Donated Goods Function Like a Drug That Recipients Must Quit
The sharpest image in From Aid to Trade comes from a Haitian, not the authors. Michel of the farmer cooperative FEDEPAT describes the pull of free food on a community trying to build its own capacity: “Every time you say ‘no’ to the [donated items], yet somebody still comes and gives, it’s like they are enabling a drug addict who wants to get off drugs. I tell donors exactly that.” The recipient who wants independence cannot get it while the supply keeps arriving.
The addiction frame explains why good intentions and even gratitude do not break the cycle. The donor feels generous and the recipient feels momentary relief, yet each delivery deepens the dependence and erodes the local capacity that would make aid unnecessary. Daniel Jean-Louis shows the same dynamic at national scale. Haiti was self-sufficient in rice until it was pressured to lower import tariffs and the United States dumped subsidized rice into the economy. The country fell from feeding itself to importing 80 percent of its rice and becoming the fourth-largest importer of subsidized US rice in the world. A nation, like an addict, lost the ability it once had.
Recovery costs more than continued supply, and that cost is the point. Michel notes it took longer to negotiate buying a tractor on credit than it would have taken to accept a donated one, yet the financed purchase held the farmers responsible for their future and built a credit record a bank could later trust. The harder path turns “subsidy into opportunity.” Quitting the drug is slower and more painful than the next free dose, which is exactly why the recipient who refuses it is choosing the future over the relief.