Michael Maren Indicts Major Charities and International Relief Organizations in His Exposé, ‘The Road to Hell’

Maybe that Christmas carol should say, ‘Tis the season to get suckered

The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. By Michael Maren. Free Press, 302 pp., $26.95, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

The Road to Hell should probably return to bookstore windows every December the way It’s a Wonderful Life comes back to television. Michael Maren is a former food monitor for the United States Agency for International Development in Somalia, and he has seen at close range the many ways misplaced charity harms the world’s poor. In this blistering and well-researched book, he exposes some the worst abuses of international relief agencies and charities — particularly CARE and Save the Children — that have grabbed a piece of my money and maybe yours, too. If you’re like me, you may wish you’d written a check instead to that food pantry in your hometown.

I reviewed The Road to Hell when it first appeared in 1997 www.netnomad.com/cpdreview.html and went back to it recently to see how it stood up to the latest upheavals among relief organizations that operate in Africa, the focus of the book. One change occurred in August when CARE said that it was rejecting some $45 million in surplus wheat, earmarked by the U.S. government for overseas distribution, because such programs hurt poor farmers who can’t compete with the low-priced food Americans dump on their local economies. You might think that such developments would make The Road to Hell www.simonsays.com seem outdated. They instead make it appear prophetic, because they implicitly support its theme: that sweeping, never-ending aid programs are the new colonialism and may create a dependency that keeps recipients from returning to self-sufficiency.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com