Humanitarian Aid as Procurement: The American Relief Administration in Postwar Europe
Tammy M. Proctor
Utah State University
In a speech at the University of Iowa in 2011, Paul Farmer spoke about his international humanitarian organization, Partners in Health, and his specific role in rebuilding Haiti after natural disaster struck there in 2010. In describing his vision of humanitarianism, Farmer emphasized two concepts – “accompaniment” and “procurement”, suggesting these were ways to counter the limitations of other development models and implying that these were innovative approaches. This paper examines the work of the American Relief Administration in the wake of World War I in Europe in order to historicize and contextualize the concepts of accompaniment and procurement in order to show their roots in earlier American foreign aid. Both of these ideas depend on a notion that was deeply embedded in the ARA model, namely that American supervisors (ideally volunteers) would serve as project managers for an army of locals who were rebuilding society after the disaster of war. These ARA men (and sometimes women) brought supervisory know-how and access to wealth and supplies, but they also brought what they saw as a necessary moral uplift message to the humanitarian work. The mix of technical skill and moral uplift, ARA officials argued, made their intervention and management crucial to the proper feeding and care of Europe’s populations. This short conference paper will examine this general concept and then rely on one case study to illustrate these humanitarian ideals. Maurice Pate, who later served as the first director of UNICEF, left diaries and letters that speak to the building of a concept of humanitarianism in the ARA that has had a lasting impact on development work in the modern world.
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