Rachel Morarjee has a good feature in the FT today with gloomy news on Afghanistan. Especially alarming, she writes, is the decision by donor agencies to channel aid towards provinces with more instability, or higher opium cultivation rates – predominantly in the south of the country. Moral hazard? You bet:
This approach overlooks the massive development needs in comparatively stable areas and [according to Anja de Beer, head of the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief] “creates perverse incentives – for provinces to create insecurity to attract resources”.
This unbalanced distribution has had observable effects on the aid effort. There were more attacks on aid agencies in the north and west than in the south during the first quarter of this year, the majority of them criminal, according to statistics from the Afghanistan NGO Security Organisation. Only 12 per cent of the attacks on aid agencies nationwide occurred in the south, where 40 per cent of the incidents linked with the insurgency took place.
