…is that it only shifts the problem geographically or delays what is sadly the inevitable.

“The UK is the world’s third largest donor from countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), following Germany ($14.5bn) and the US ($30.7bn). But as a percentage of gross national income (GNI), British aid spending was 0.56% in 2011 – far greater than the US equivalent of 0.20%. Only five OECD countries – Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark, and the Netherlands – have already met the 0.7% commitment.

“What does this mean for the UK taxpayer? With a population of about 62.6 million, last year’s £8.57bn spend works out at roughly £137 per head.”

Source

Now I don’t have a problem with spending money to help others. I earn decent money. I tip. I buy the occasional Big Issue. I give to charity.

But I do wonder if all I’m doing is helping people with the best of intentions try to hold back a tsunami with a couple of bits of plywood.

The world’s population doubled between 1960 and 1999 and reached 7bn in 2012 with growth rates of around 1%. We can’t feed the world as it is.

Humanitarian aid helps solve short term issues but merely postpones the inevitable: we can’t feed the people we have now, but by keeping the babies we see on TV, breaking our hearts, alive, we are condemning them to a life of hardship and suffering, surely?

That 1% growth rate is the average: in sub-Saharan Africa it’s more than 2.5%, in the areas where the environment is less able to support its present population.

The way to feed more people is to grow more crops and to do that we need to invest in developing the ground conditions to allow sustainable agriculture. But even if we could cultivate more areas of Africa, where do all the people go? It’s just not going to work. Instead, we throw aid as a form of Band-Aid over a severed limb. Sometimes that aid gets used as a weapon by those involved in civil wars or otherwise corrupt.

But it makes us in the first world feel less guilty when we Do Something to ‘help’ the third world. And I reckon by doing so, we do more harm than good. The more people we save, the worse it gets. And it won’t end unless we have a complete rethink.