Wealthy Nations have an Obligation to Provide Developmental Assistance

*Please forgive me for my English. This was copied from my LD case, and I wanted to see how it is. Other responses won't be as so. This debate is truly based around 1 main question: Is developmental assistance beneficial? If it is, it is obvious we should provide it. But if it is not, and is actually a detriment to human welfare, we should clearly not give aid. Contention 1: Developmental assistance doesn"t help the poor Subpoint A: Foreign aid didn"t help the poor in the past, and increases problems Deaton, 17 It sounds kind of crazy to say that foreign aid often hurts, rather than helps, poor people in poor countries. Yet much of the $135 billion spent on official aid in 2014 may not have ended up helping the poor. [Billions were wasted because of corruption] the level of foreign aid into Africa soared through the 1980s and 1990s, African economies were doing worse than ever, The effect wasn't limited to Africa. Many economists were noticing that an influx of foreign aid did not seem to produce economic growth in countries In order to have the funding to run a country, a government needs to collect taxes from its people. Since the people ultimately hold the [power] they have a certain amount of control over their government. If leaders don't deliver the basic services they promise, the people have the power to cut them off. [In aid reliant countries, this isn"t the case, and they lack the balance between the government and the people] most governments depend on their people for taxes in order to run themselves and provide services to their people. Governments that get all their money from aid don"t have that at all, wealth from foreign aid can be a corrupting influence on weak governments, developmental assistance [has been] used to support despotic regimes including [those] in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Somalia [and], Cambodia [With Rwanda and Cambodia having 2 of the worst genocides since the Holocaust. The genocide in Rwanda killed off a million in less than 3 months. During Pol Pot"s rule as Prime Minister of Cambodia, more than a fourth of the country was exterminated in less than 4 years.] the United States [often] gives aid " to support our strategic allies, our commercial interests or our moral or political beliefs, rather than [to help] the local people. For example the US gave aid to Ethiopia for decades under President Asres because he opposed Islamic fundamentalism Never mind that Asres was "one of the most repressive and autocratic dictators in Africa [Mauritania stopped receiving US aid when its government became too oppressive, but gained aid again when it became one of the few Arab nations to recognize Israel. Along with those are the many countries like Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, that the USSR and US tried to buy support from during the Cold War with developmental aid] What these countries need even more than money is effective governance, something that foreign aid can undermine, [Developmental assistance doesn"t help; rather than alleviate suffering and solving the problem, it increases it.] Sub point B: DA doesn"t cause economic growth Heritage Foundation 16 many economic studies find no correlation or even an inverse correlation between provision of development assistance and economic growth and development. studies by economists have shown repeatedly that there is no robust correlation between ODA and long-term, sustainable economic development: economic growth, job creation, and higher living standards. Foreign aid rarely generates sustained prosperity, and if it does achieve short-term success, it does so at a very high price. Contention 2: Developmental assistance harms countries in the long term Sub point A: DA causes dependency Tirmizi 10 foreign aid creates dependency. Unlike loans, which need to be paid back, aid does not have any requirement for being repaid and thus is far less likely to be utilised efficiently. [On average, 10% of the African GDP is from Developmental Assistance] Even if it is used exactly as intended, it still allows the government to live beyond its means without consequences. Pakistan [for example]. has relied on foreign aid from almost the very beginning of its history [and]. As a result the government never faced enough fiscal pressure to fully tax the economy, [and] simply prints more money to pay its bills [when it doesn"t get enough aid] Even debt forgiveness is bad for the economy in the long run since it sends a signal to the government that borrowed money need not be repaid. then there are problems with the mechanism of aid delivery itself. Take, for example, food aid. [Many countries lack sufficient food, and wealthy nations give them food aid.] giving out free food, prices it at zero. [However, this [also] means that any farmer in the recipient country who may have been in a position to grow and sell food now has a competitor who sells their product at absolute zero, making it impossible for this local farmer to compete. [the farmer"s] entire commercial enterprise is rendered worthless. [The food industry is ruined, making the nation reliant on foreign aid to feed it"s civilians, meaning that the country is back to the problem of lacking sufficient food. ] In Tanzania [many] farmers simply stopped producing food because of the availability of free donated food. Aid, therefore, provides only temporary solutions to chronic problems while deepening the structural flaws that caused them in the first place. In conclusion, in order for the affirmative to win the debate, they must prove that the benefits of developmental assistance outweigh the problems of corruption, dependency, a lack of economic growth, and the litany of other problems caused by it. If DA isn"t beneficial, we shouldn"t give it. That point is beyond obvious. Until the affirmative proves that this is the case, the negation has won on the onset. For this reasons, you must vote for the negation.