Development assistance should be priotized over miltia aid in Sahel

I stand in affirmation of the resolution. Resolved: Development assistance should be prioritized over military aid in the Sahel region of Africa. I affirm the resolution on two contentions. One, military assistance to Africa increases exploitation and abuse. Two, development aid is greatly beneficial to the African Sahel region"s agriculture. Follow me now to my first contention. First, that military assistance to Africa increases exploitation and abuse. Military assistance from other countries to Africa has a history of increasing abuse by training the people causing the problem. The Open Society Justice Initiative in 2012 reports that counterterrorism efforts authorized and aided by the UN after the July 2010 World Cup Bombing in Uganda led to human rights abuses against the supposed terrorists including denial of due process rights, physical abuse, arbitrary detentions, and unlawful renditions. Along with the U.N. military aid that lead to abuses, the United States has a track record of training militants that go against their cause. The Washington Post reports in May 2013 that a U.N. report found that the 391st Congolese army battalion that received military training from the United States went on to commit mass rapes and other atrocities in 2012. The United State"s goal in the Congo was to professionalize their "ragtag" military, and in the end they only made the human rights abuses worse as they provided them the tools and expertise to commit them. Additionally, in Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post in 2012 reports that the leader of a Mali coup that disrupted democratic elections was professionally trained by the United States. Because of this coup the United States military was required to suspend relations with Mali. On top of this, a report from Oendrila Dube from Columbia University analyzed political violence data and found that United States military assistance throughout the world increased attacks by paramilitaries especially during election years. The report also found that foreign military assistances strengthens armed non-state actors. These incidents and reports show that as a whole, U.S. military aid is not effective and in fact counterproductive as it increases militant"s ability to create rights abuses. Second, development aid is greatly beneficial to the African Sahel region"s agriculture. Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen, economics professors at Georgetown University reported in 2008 that sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest agricultural productivity in the world and the highest percentage of people living in poverty. Stephen Cockburn of Oxfam International reported in May 2012 that there is a food crisis in Sahel. The country of Mali alone has 3,600,000 people with severely insecure food resources. According to an Oxfam survey in the Sahelian belt of Eastern Chad, 63% of households were unable to cover their food needs after February 2012. Food stocks have already run out in many communities, with an estimated 18.4 million people in nine countries in extreme hunger. Desertification, or land degradation, is a major issue in the Sahel. According to the Economist in December 2010, desertification is often caused by poor farming methods. This includes nomadic behavior and lack of crop rotation, which are prevalent in the Sahel. However, development assistance would help stop these harmful behaviors. Development assistance in agriculture is proactive and long term. Long-term development assistance is sensitive to drought risks and reduces vulnerability by reducing risk factors. An example of this development assistance is the Syngenta Foundation. This organization has partnered with the governments of many Sahel countries, including Mali, to introduce numerous seed varieties and technologies for semi-arid areas. They"ve also set up cooperatives and greatly improved the access of these countries to markets. Farmers in this area are seeing increasing opportunities to become viable commercial partners. This would help stop desertification because farmers would actually be able to become large-scale farmers, rather than just continuing to be subsistence planters. The Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture is supporting rice intensification projects in Senegal, Mali, and Burkina Faso, which has made the rice supply chain more efficient and reliable, greatly increased yields, and most importantly will help establish food security in this region. Saving human lives is the most important weight in this round, and development assistance provides the stability people in the Sahel need to survive. I affirm the resolution on two contentions. One, military assistance to Africa increases exploitation and abuse. Two, development aid is greatly beneficial to the African Sahel region"s agriculture. I also disagree with my oppenent on the fact that when we sent military to South Sudan in the past we not only saw that the aid did not help stabalize the country, but it helped create a civil war! the weopons and training we provided were not used how we intended them to be used for and instead were used to kill more people, this goes to show that it also lowered their security. http://www.petermartell.com... On the other hand, developmental assistance ensures to help stabalize the country and security with the use of cameras or other such items. Onto terrorism, military force alone isn't enough to solve terrorism http://leadership.ng..., you first need a stable government, which has been imperically proven that military aid will not provide. also when attacking terrorism we need not to attack from the outside and go and kill all of these groups, but instead go to the root cause which is poverty, hunger and famine to permanently stop terrorism from happening instead of attacking the groups right away and then hoping they will not recover. We can see that terrorism starts with poverty with logic, when a family becomes poor they look to alternatives which includes terrorism, so when provided with healthier, better paying non-life threatening jobs such as in agriculture these terrorists will drop out of the groups to make the money.