Lords Of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, And Corruption Of The International Aid Business

Atlantic Monthly Press, Foreign aid has reached immense proportions. If one excludes the billions spent yearly by private voluntary organizations such as the Hunger Project, Oxfam, and World Vision, and looks just at money raised by taxation and distributed by government agencies, the figure hovers around $60 billion a year. The budgets of most multinational corporations, including Standard Oil, IBM, Phillips, Nestlé, and Volkswagen, pale in comparison. And yet this figure, Graham Hancock, a former aid worker for the British Overseas Development Administration, points out, doesn’t even include the billions more in government-to-government loans, unless they are “soft” or concessional loans. The question Hancock asks, and answers, in this explosive book is just whom is this “aid” aiding.