Doing For Oneself

And at the risk of coming across a broken record (albeit one with a very long cycle time), when someone comes to view themselves as essential to the well-being of another person or persons, they view what is best for themselves as also being in the direct interest of those they are looking after. To fall back on my Good Shepherd analogy yet again, a shepherd may be utterly convinced that sacrificing one or two of the animals in the flock to save themselves is the best thing for the flock. After all, where would they be without the shepherd? And so even if the shepherd aids themselves at the direct expense of their charges, the flock is still better off than it would be under the alternative.
Minding the Flock

I was reminded of this when I was reading a news story about the nakedly self-serving provisions that organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, U.S. Wheat Associates and the National Association of Wheat Growers want to see encoded into law as part of the "American Farmers Feed the World Act." The simple description is that it would prevent a federal program called Food For Peace from giving money or vouchers to recipients. It would also prevent the program from buying food locally in the countries where it works. Instead it would require that the program's budget be used to buy food from American farmers, and use American companies to export it out. It would also move the program from the United States Agency for International Development to the Department of Agriculture.

One could see U.S. Wheat Associates and its allies as being deliberately greedy, backing approaches that work to entrench poverty abroad, rather than fighting it, with the full intention of lining their pockets at taxpayer expense. But I suspect that, as with the Good Shepherd analogy that I keep coming back to, that leaders in American agribusiness see this not as helping themselves, but as helping everyone. And I suspect that this is something that a lot of people outside of the United States realize about it; the tendency to see itself as indispensable to the world. And so the United States see aggressively looking after it own interests as something that it's doing for the world at large.

Of course, this way of looking at the world (and, perhaps, avoiding looking at oneself) existed prior to the formation of the United States, and it will exist even once the United States has passed into history. What's interesting about it is how open it all is. The fact that the United States effectively dumps commodities (clothing being another big one) on poor nations in a manner that crushes their local industries (and therefore, hampers their ability to lift themselves out of poverty) has been known, and talked about, for years. The piece on the NPR website is far from the first time that I've read about it.

Of course, a sense of entitlement also fits the bill. I'm sure that if one were to ask advocates for American agribusiness, they would rather confidently claim that American farmers are deserving of the aid money that is funneled to them, even it means that it's spent less efficiently than it could be. After all, what good is being exceptional, if it doesn't come with financial benefit?