Give a man a fish
The element of the film Poverty Inc. that I’d like to talk about is the idiom “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life” which, to me, seemed to underlie the entire film. This phrase was said almost verbatim by several of the people interviewed in the film, and also formed the basis of the overall critique of developmentalism that was put forth in the piece. One of the points repeatedly made by the African speakers was that the influx of free aid items (rice, shoes) was disincentivising the youth from engaging in industrious action since there was no need (why work when you can get things for free), but also more crucially, because there was no point since there was no way they could compete with the subsidised goods. And yet, the influx of free goods was not reliable, creating a precarity that cannot be ameliorated internally because there is a sporadic flooding of the market with free goods that entirely wipes out any indigenous producers who cannot sustain competition with the free aid goods. Even so, when discussing these negative impacts of free aid, most of the speakers in the film were at pains to highlight the good intentions of the donors. The striking exception to this was Mr. Hermon Chinner-Hesse, a very successful tech entrepreneur in Ghana, who said that “the World Bank and development agencies have an agenda outside the development of our countries”. Even here, he did not clearly specify the nefarious and detrimental nature of this agenda, which is quite clear to the viewer throughout the documentary.
This is interesting in relation to the idea of the Perfect Gift in American society as described by Carrithers, because it is a clear reflection that when it comes to gifted aid, there is certainly a degree of mental gymnastics that we are all trained to conduct to divorce the impact of the gift from the intentions of its giver. Even in a documentary whose primary focus is illustrating the racket of the global industry that entrenches poverty and makes a business out of keeping millions of people in a position of need and deprivement, there is still an effort to appeal to the idea of the aid coming from well-intentioned donors who are not to be held directly responsible for the clearly negative impact of their donations.
Contributed by PaavniSobti on 23/01/2023
