Canada spends about $2.2 billion annually on foreign aid to poor nations. This spending should be completely eliminated, if recent books by Observer columnist George Monbiot and foreign aid economist John Perkins tell any truth.

According to these two authors, foreign aid only serves to further deepen poor nations' public debts. Though marketed to the Canadians who provide it as our expression of goodwill to the unfortunate of the world, in fact our foreign aid budget only contributes to a culture of helplessness among what there is of a professional class in those nations, undermines existing cultural values in the most vulnerable among them, (replacing them with Western imperial values), and ends up never leaving Canada in the first place. Most foreign aid is aid only to Canadians and Canadian companies.

According to Monbiot in The Age of Consent: A manifesto for a new world order , and to Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hitman , and undoubtedly to the surprise of a majority of unsuspecting Canadians who support foreign aid spending for genuinely altruistic reasons, this is exactly what foreign aid provided by countries like Canada is intended to do.

The biggest reason why poor nations have remained intractably poor is not for any lack in them of professional expertise, the spirit of entrepreneurialism, or even sufficient domestic capital, insists Monbiot. Any foreign aid nominally meant to provide expertise or capital or to create conditions that encourage entrepreneurialism instead only cripples what those countries have of those qualities naturally—and cripple them is what foreign aid is meant to do.

High levels of foreign debt are the main reason poor nations have remained poor. Specifically, it is the interest on that debt that needs to be paid that keeps them poor. Interest on foreign debt among the poorest countries consumes half or more of their government budgets, and up to 90 percent in some cases. Because of these high interest payments, national governments have no funds left for useful water and sewage projects, highway developments, schools and hospitals, or to create incentives to encourage domestic industries—all the ingredients of any sound national strategy to build a successful economy. Even in those poor nations that have improved their overall poverty situation, a large underclass of impoverished people continues to grow, and to grow more desperate, even as foreign aid continues to pour into those countries.

The biggest reason poor nations suffer inordinately high debt loads is because their governments were either enticed or forced into accepting huge foreign loans usually for the construction of useless or far too elaborate and expensive electricity generating plants and power distribution grids, vast irrigation projects, huge military equipment acquisitions, super-freeway construction projects, and the like.

Those poor nations' governments were enticed by teams of professional economists and financial advisers from wealthy Western nations deployed by Western banking institutions, international agencies like the IMF and World Bank, apparently philanthropic non-governmental organizations, and Western governments themselves—often, as in the case of Canada, as part of our foreign aid spending.

These traveling economists and advisers we Canadians funded through our taxes as part of our feel-good foreign aid budgets have always served one basic and intentional purpose: to destroy the ability of poor nations to ever escape their foreign debt, to ever be able to fund their own infrastructure development, to ever spawn a successful domestic economy, and to ever stop being poor. Only in that regard can it ever be said that Canada's foreign aid has been successful.

Perkins should know. He was recruited by a private consulting company into a career of going to poor nations' capitals, meeting with political and business leaders there, and in exchange (but only if necessary) for enriching those individuals, obtaining their signatures on financial and other aid agreements designed deliberately to destroy what future potential their countries and people had.

He did this by intentionally burdening their public sectors, their financial systems, and their entire societies with impossible-to-service debt loads taken on by contracts to build useless installations. Perkins did this under the guise of offering these foreign leaders and their nations expert financial advice purportedly useful to them in their efforts to construct viable domestic economies that might someday pay down their debts, such as they were before his arrival, and build thriving prosperous societies for their people.

But unknown to these foreign leaders (most but not all of the time), the system of foreign aid set up by Western governments, including Canada's, and their financial and other businesses, was specifically designed to generate their nation's default on interest payments, defaults that would then require IMF and World Bank interventions of the most drastic sort.

Once these nations defaulted, another team of economic specialists from the IMF would be dispatched to the foreign capitals to begin dictating political surrender terms to the governments and their people, terms which typically included massive cuts to all social program spending, all infrastructure spending, all programs intended to incubate growing domestic industries, and all domestic financial protection measures. The aim of the IMF in all its efforts, according to Perkins, has been to set up the conditions for total economic and social collapse in the host nations it is invited to.

Following total economic collapse, what there remains of public sector infrastructure can be privatized to Western business interests for pennies on the dollar; natural resources still existing on land, underground, or offshore can be exploited rapidly and in wholesale fashion at rock bottom prices to supply Western manufacturing companies; and what remains of the potentially profitable private domestic economy can be completely taken over with little Western direct foreign investment. Foreign aid, in the tale Perkins tells, is always meant strictly to finance an advance party for an aggressive imperial expansion by an insidious combined Western government and private corporate business complex.

If Perkins failed to obtain these nations' leaders signatures on such devastating agreements, the jackals, as he called them, would be the next group sent to see them. “Jackals” is Perkins' term for CIA torturers and assassins. If the jackals failed to convince the leaders or to replace them with more compliant leaders, the might of the Western armies—usually the American army—would be deployed to make the stronger case.

From Saudi Arabia to Thailand and to Panama and Argentina, and from Guatemala to Nicaragua to Iran and on to Afghanistan and to Iraq, Perkins provides detailed, knowledgeable, and persuasive, in-depth illustrations. He knows many of these cases intimately because he worked on them in the field, garnering great accolades and promotions for his career-long success at it. Perkins is convincing.

So is Monbiot. He argues that most third-world debt is created not so much by loans as by trade imbalances, but that those trade imbalances are intentionally constructed by Western governments through various financial instruments, some posing as foreign aid. The entire effort is aimed at maintaining desperately poor, undercapitalized societies that will thereby forever supply very cheap labour and very easily stolen natural resources from targeted nations, in addition to acting as dumping markets for Western industrial manufacturers, including those who produce arms.

It is Monbiot's idea that all Western citizens, to the extent they are genuinely concerned about desperate poverty, global instability, and civil and international war, ought to insist on immediate cessation of all standard foreign aid provided by their governments to poor nations. In place of aid, Monbiot suggests we assign an equivalent amount of funding to the encouragement of imports from poor nations of the finished products of their domestic economy, abiding by established fair trade standards.

Only by artificially creating sustained balance of trade surpluses for heavily indebted poor nations can we hope to help them escape poverty, build a thriving domestic economy, and take meaningful, professional and indigenous control of it. This, Monbiot says, can only take place if those poor nations are encouraged to build protective trade barriers around their key developing industries and to place tight controls on movements of capital in and out of their nations.

This, he says, must be encouraged even while developed countries like Canada loosen trade barriers and capital controls to allow the flow of third world products into our markets even while our products are barred from theirs, and to enable capital to flee our economy to theirs, but not to flee their economy and drift back to ours.

A balance of trade surplus for poor nations should be sustained by such measures until their indices of health, education, and economic success come close to matching our own, at which time equal rules would begin to apply to them as those that apply to us.

To the argument that no Western capital would flow to poor nations if it were to be subject to controls once it arrived there, Monbiot suggests that, first of all, with sufficient controls, there would be enough domestic capital in most poor nations.

Second, he says, if enough Western nations converted their foreign aid efforts into efforts to genuinely help the development of poor nation economies with these measures, Western capital would find Western markets for finished products manufactured in third world nations, according to fair trade standards. Since there would be a known amount of trade surplus Western nations were interested in creating in third world nations, investors in those nations' industries, whether domestic or foreign, would be inclined to concentrate as much value-added processing to their exports as they can to capture as big a part of the surplus as possible. Those who set up to manufacture and export highly refined furniture, for example, would be naturally favoured over those who were interested only to export raw logs, helping thereby, also, to create a middleclass of skilled craftsman, instead of an underclass of simple resource harvesters.

Of course, such measures would mean exposing our own protected industries to foreign competitors from the third world, spelling some economic dislocation for some of our workers in a few of our industries. The alternative is what we've supported so far: foreign aid, which has done nothing but bring serious, economy-wide dislocation, and much else that is negative, to those we're told we are helping.

Canada has led the charge to forgive third world debt. This policy is misguided, for it would only serve to open the door to another few decades of continuation of grossly unjust policies that have brought, and can only continue to bring, grievous levels of harm to people we genuinely wish none for. Canada should instead lead the charge in creating intentional and sustained trade deficits for our economy in relationship to those countries of the third world we target for our help.

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