Tornado Alley: Where’s the Foreign Aid?

Food-producing Midwest our leverage against OPEC

This past week the television news was filled with images of destruction and death. In central China earthquake rescue efforts were shifting gears from attempting to find survivors in the rubble to dealing with the thousands of newly homeless. In Myanmar foreign aid workers were trying to convince that country’s military government to let them enter and help survivors of the worst cyclone in modern history.

Meanwhile, the images from tornado-stricken areas of Kansas, Oklahoma and other Midwestern states showed survivors getting help only from their local emergency agencies.

Am I the only person who wonders where the foreign aid is in the Midwest? I fully realize that the scale of destruction in the Midwest due to recent tornadoes is much smaller in terms of lives and homes lost when compared to the events in China and Myanmar. And I also realize that the United States is relatively isolated geographically from many of the nations that send rescue workers to other parts of the globe.

But it would be nice if someone asked to help out.

It seems as if anytime a disaster hits another part of the world, relief agencies located in our country race to the scene with doctors, tents and bottled water. When Katrina struck the Gulf of Mexico area three years ago, the only instance of foreign aid offered that I can recall is when Cuba asked if it could fly doctors to New Orleans. Of course, the Bush Administration flatly refused that offer of help.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. Other countries are so used to the U.S. telling them how to run their business that they figure that we’ll tell them to help us if we need any assistance. The atmosphere of international cooperation between America and its allies has certainly taken a hit over the past seven-and-a-half years, that’s for sure.

But I think there’s also a global perception that America is so rich and powerful that we couldn’t possibly need help from anyone. We surely fuel that perception with the amount of money we let bleed from our borders. We have spent half a trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and annually the Foreign Operations Appropriations bill gives over $20 billion to governments with no obligation to repay us in any tangible manner.

“Foreign aid distorts foreign economies and props up bad governments,” said Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. “It breeds resentment among citizens of foreign countries, who see the United States as keeping oppressive governments in power.”

Paul added that, “charity must come voluntarily from the heart, not under threat from the IRS.”

The misconception that United States citizens can afford these kinds of foreign endeavors is coming crashing down under the weight of increasing gas prices. As more and more people spend a higher percentage of their incomes on food, gas and other necessities, they will be taking a harder look at where their tax money is going as well.

No stranger to pointing the finger of blame, many conservative columnists have somehow managed to accuse environmentalists for the current rise in gas and food prices. Their argument is two-fold, saying that environmentalists are keeping oil companies from drilling in places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and that the Energy Policy Act of 2005, increasing the amount of biofuels added to gas in the country, has raised food prices, particularly for corn.

When in doubt, blame the hippies.

To the first argument, the United States currently imports 70% of all of the fossil fuels used in the country and experts predict that drilling in the Arctic would only drop that number to 67%. Then you have the problem of actually refining that oil and no new oil refineries have been built in this country since 1976.

“What we are hearing from the White House and Republicans (in Congress) is the same song, same dance: drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. “We know we can’t drill our way out of this problem.”

To the issue of using corn for biofuels, it is no more taking food from the grocery shelves than using corn to feed livestock or using corn syrup as a sweetener instead of sugar cane. Scientists are busy developing ways of creating ethanol from wood chips and from the non-edible parts of plants (corn stalks, corn cobs), to help alleviate the problem. But the main reason food prices are going up at the grocery store is the rising cost of transportation (i.e. gasoline).

The United States, Canada and the other major food producing nations of the world should take a page from OPEC, and realize their primary concern is the protection of their own citizens’ interests. If we treated the production and distribution of wheat the way Saudi Arabia does oil, the rest of the world might be a little quicker to help us when we have a disaster in the Midwest.