I do not think intentions are better than end results. I now work for a large-scale agricultural commodity buyer, as part of a corporate responsibility & sustainability unit, and we have to be very, very careful that the communities we work with are not left much worse off than before our intervention, even if it is done in the name of “social responsibility.”

Even interventions facilitated by the U.S. government, arguably the most effective administrator of aid & foreign assistance in the world, are, with good intent, net negative. In Bangladesh, U.S. Feed the Future extension workers encouraged rice farmers to switch to growing wheat for the 2015/16 growing season. A new-to-Asia fungus, wheat blast, soon wiped out wheat stores across Bangladesh, destroying up to 90% of farmers’ crops and leaving them without food or a means of income. If we find, say, a spike in farmer suicides as a direct result of U.S. involvement in Bangladeshi agricultural “development”, the good intent of the U.S. government doesn’t matter. At all.

In my opinion, the desire to “help people” is the wrong approach to any work related to international development, whether that be through a social justice or economic development lens. Social justice is about empowering others who are working towards success, happiness, and equality, as defined by that particular community, not about helping those who are perceived as helpless. Economic development is about connecting previously disenfranchised people to markets and job opportunities, which is beneficial to all.

To me, working in international development is not, primarily, about personal challenge or growth. I think that approach is driven by a desire to dip one’s toe in the sorrow of others in order to give one’s own life perspective. International development, to me, is working first for other people, and then for myself, to make the world and its limited resources beneficial and sustainable for all 9 billion of us. I work for my grandchildren as well as the grandchildren of the farmers I talk to every day. I am not a good Samaritan or a better person because I chose to build my career in sustainability, I am simply doing my job. My mundane job that focuses on spreadsheets and numbers and budgets, and it just so happens that those spreadsheets and numbers and budgets translate to smallholder coffee farmers.

Thoughts?