Disaster aid: how US charity begins at home

It's hard enough for today's citizens to figure out what our western governments are really doing in the world, so just imagine being a target of their policies overseas. When programmes branded as "aid" can cause serious harm, and their failures are blamed on the would-be recipients, confusion is sure to ensue. Similarly, following a storm or conflict, a foreign military can one day show up, but before long, interest wanes. In this light, the aims of Washington or London can be as inscrutable to a vulnerable, crisis-racked country as the intentions of a half-seen cat are to a mouse.

But we don't always have to guess. Helpfully, powerful leaders now and again stop to explain their motivations. One such moment came in a speech given in October 2011 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Addressing an audience of wealthy New Yorkers, she laid out a vision of what the US is trying to accomplish in the world; it was very telling for those trying to understand foreign aid – and its younger, hipper cousin, investment.

Clinton told the audience: "Our problems have never respected dividing lines between global economics and international diplomacy. And neither can our solutions." That is why, she explained, she has put "economic statecraft" at the heart of the US foreign policy agenda. Clinton further defined how the US can use "the forces and tools of global economics" to bolster American "diplomacy and presence" abroad and to strengthen the economy at home. She argued that America should "put economics at the center" of its foreign policy. In foreign relations, the question should always be "how will this affect our economic growth?"

A superpower such as the US would, of course, always consider its domestic interests, especially economic ones, when it acts abroad. But we tend to forget this whenever the conversation turns to a specific circumstance – the intervention in one war instead of another, or the way we choose to respond to a humanitarian crisis abroad.

Take the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Clinton herself said in the wake of the disaster that it was necessary to work with Haiti's government and not go around it by supporting NGOs or foreign-government projects as had been done destructively in the past. Bill Clinton remarked in March 2010 that a policy of importing huge amounts of heavily subsidised US rice and other grain into the impoverished country, which undercut Haitian farmers and drove families into poverty, had to change. Yet none of the US humanitarian funds spent in Haiti after the quake, and only about 1% of the longer-term recovery funds, went to the government. And the food policy remains unaddressed.

The US government meanwhile has slowly trickled out money it pledged for Haiti's reconstruction in 2010 (so far only about a third of the $906 million it pledged three years ago has been delivered). The housing, healthcare, energy and food security situations in Haiti are as dire as ever. One thing Washington has done is enthusiastically to participate in the construction of an industrial park for low-wage garment factories in the north of the country, well outside the quake zone – $224m in financing a power plant, housing and other infrastructure at the park. This even though Haiti's last flirtation with a low-wage assembly sector ended in misery after firms fled the country in the 1980s.

All this would seem confusing and contradictory but for the bottom line. An unbalanced food policy remains very good for American rice growers, who in Haiti enjoy their fifth-largest export market. A major aid-and-development industry meanwhile depends on US largesse (in 2009, for instance, USAID paid more than $6.9bn to its top 20 vendors, mostly American firms that spent thousands lobbying for more). And the same applies to the industrial park: low-paid workers will sew cheap clothes that can be imported duty free and sold at stores such as Target, Walmart and JoS A Bank.

Washington likes free-trade agreements because they have provided a bonanza for major US corporations. Indeed, in her New York speech, Hillary Clinton foresaw a "hemispheric trade partnership reaching from the Arctic to the tip of Argentina" that will harness "the power of proximity to turn growth across the Americas into recovery and jobs here in the United States". But economists are divided on whether such agreements are good for poor countries – Haiti's experience with them has been unquestionably awful.

This is not to say that all of us, even all of our officials, are simply venal. There was compassion, kindness and duty in the response to the earthquake. A lack of coordination among aid groups, along with an unwillingness to follow the lead of Haitians, helped cause many of the problems that ensued. But we ought to take Secretary Clinton's words seriously, and understand that economic considerations have likely been a "significant part of that equation" in Haiti as well. We can then embrace the possibility that the seemingly charitable responder also has something to gain. How much economic statecraft do we want to see in our response to disasters? That's up to us citizens to decide.