NGOs: the self-appointed altruists

Many NGOs promote economic causes - anti-globalization, the banning of child labour, the relaxing of intellectual property rights, or fair payment for agricultural products. Many of these causes are both worthy and sound. Alas, most NGOs lack economic expertise and inflict damage on the alleged recipients of their beneficence. NGOs are at times manipulated by - or collude with - industrial groups and political parties.

The denizens of many developing countries suspect the West and its NGOs of promoting an agenda of trade protectionism. Stringent - and expensive - labour and environmental provisions in international treaties may well be a ploy to fend off imports based on cheap labour and the competition they wreak on well-ensconced domestic industries and their political stooges.

Take child labour - as distinct from the universally condemnable phenomena of child prostitution, child soldiering, or child slavery.

Child labour, in many destitute locales, is all that separates the family from all-pervasive, life threatening, poverty. As national income grows, child labour declines. Following the 1995 outcry provoked by NGOs against soccer balls stitched by children in Pakistan, both Nike and Reebok relocated their workshops and sacked countless women and 7000 children. The average family income - meagre in any case - fell by 20 per cent.

This affair elicited the following wry commentary from economists Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardorif, and Robert Stern:

"While Baden Sports can quite credibly claim that their soccer balls are not sewn by children, the relocation of their production facility undoubtedly did nothing for their former child workers and their families."

This is far from being a unique case. Threatened with legal reprisals and "reputation risks" (being named-and-shamed by overzealous NGOs) - multinationals engage in pre-emptive sacking. More than 50,000 children in Bangladesh were let go in 1993 by German garment factories in anticipation of the American never-legislated Child Labor Deterrence Act.

Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, observed:

"Stopping child labor without doing anything else could leave children worse off. If they are working out of necessity, as most are, stopping them could force them into prostitution or other employment with greater personal dangers. The most important thing is that they be in school and receive the education to help them leave poverty."

NGO-fostered hype notwithstanding, 70 per cent of all children work within their family unit in agriculture. Less than 1 percent are employed in mining and another 2 percent in construction. Again contrary to NGO-proffered panaceas, education is not a solution. Millions graduate every year in developing countries - 100,000 in Morocco alone. But unemployment reaches more than one third of the workforce in places such as Macedonia.

Children at work may be harshly treated by their supervisors but at least they are kept off the far-more-menacing streets. Some kids even end up with a skill and are rendered employable.

The Economist sums up the short-sightedness, ineptitude, ignorance, and self-centeredness of NGOs neatly: