(This is an archived extract from the book Patterns of Power: Edition 2)
There are both private and public donations to people in developing countries:
· People in wealthy countries feel a connection to those in developing countries, through their common humanity, and want to alleviate their suffering. For example, many people respond generously to requests for humanitarian assistance, as with the Haiti earthquake in 2010.[1]
· Tax only supports a minimum level of government aid to people in other countries and many people feel that they want to give more and can afford to do so. Peter Singer argued that it is a moral duty for individual people to give money to charities working in developing countries.[2]
· In the case of a natural disaster, people like to feel that they are helping others by the provision of humanitarian aid – and governments are able to marshal the necessary resources more easily than any individual could do, particularly when the disaster concerned is on the other side of the world. Governments would not take such steps, though, unless they felt that the population agreed with the spending of public money and that the action would be popular, or at least neutral, in terms of public support for the government.
· If people feel that their government is not behaving morally with regard to developing countries, they can put pressure on their politicians to do better – as described in the previous section (4.3.4).
People in developing countries have come to expect assistance, and even to protest if it is not forthcoming,[3] so there is some global acceptance of universal socio-economic rights.
© PatternsofPower.org, 2014
[1] The world had pledged $2.4 billion for the Haiti earthquake, according to a spreadsheet on the Guardian website, which was available in May 2014 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jan/14/haiti-quake-aid-pledges-country-donations.
[2] Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. His book on giving is entitled The Life You Can Save and the related website (as at May 2014) is http://www.thelifeyoucansave.com.
He proposed that everyone in wealthier countries should make a modest level of individual contributions, via NGOs such as charities, to help to save lives and reduce poverty. The level of giving that he recommends is calculated as a percentage of income, where 90% of people in developed economies would pay 1% of their incomes (rich people would pay more).
[3] On 16 October 2010, PressTV published a report entitled Angry Haitians protest UN 'occupation', which was available in May 2014 at http://www.presstv.ir/detail/146902.html. Its strapline read:
“A group of Haitian protesters have clashed with UN troops in the capital Port-au-Prince over ‘the lack of foreign aid and continuing foreign military presence’."