I think you are overly focused on how things are done in the US, where it is thankfully quite rare to outright starve.
In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.
OK that is true and I didn't mean to imply it was happening everywhere. Sorry to offend. At the same time, my point that "it's not always just bureaucracy" is sadly still quite true too.
Yeah, quickly browsing this source it looks like Gaza is the primary location where aid workers are in danger (by a long shot. 181 killed in a year). Followed by Sudan, which is in an active civil war (60 aid workers killed).
That's bad, but it doesn't seem incredibly common.
The rest of africa looks to be pretty tame by comparison.
There are quite a few in non-war zones - e.g. Nigeria has 47 just being killed or kidnapped by armed gangs in the country as they seem to have really taken defunding the police to heart. I wouldn't call that pretty tame.
No, that 47 number is for all incidents in Nigeria.
The number of killed is 12 according to this report. I should also mention the fact that these aren't killing "foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy". Instead the report calls out just general crime being the primary reason for the deaths.
> Nigeria saw a significant increase in all victim types (killed, injured, kidnapped) from 2023 to 2024, with fatalities up to 12 from just 2 the previous year. Ongoing insurgency and criminal activity made road ambushes the most common attack location, with small arms fire and assaults both rising as types of violence. More kidnappings and violent robberies occurred at personal residences across several regions than in previous years, highlighting the increasing risks of targeted attacks.
Well yes, I think if you’re talking about war torn countries then yes. But when you talk about stable countries, poverty still exists and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy and its impact on distribution is still the same.
And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.
In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.