AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show looking at a critique of the role of the U.S. Agency for International Development and other international aid agencies, the role they play in the Global South.

We’re joined by Kathryn Mathers, an anthropologist and professor at Duke University. Her new piece for the website Africa Is a Country is headlined “The wrong way to end aid.” She writes, “The humanitarian industrial complex should be dismantled — but not by a billionaire-backed administration with no plan beyond abandonment.” Professor Mathers is the author of two books, Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa and White Saviorism and Popular Culture: Imagined Africa as a Space for American Salvation. Professor Mathers is a co-producer of the forthcoming documentary When I Say Africa.

Professor Mathers, welcome to Democracy Now!

KATHRYN MATHERS: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: As you look at what’s happening at USAID, the complete dismantling of this agency, can you share your critique of the agency, but what you think must be done?

KATHRYN MATHERS: Yes, I referenced, as you called, the framing of the humanitarian-industrial complex, because I think USAID is very much part of a system and industry that not only depends on global inequality, global suffering, but in many ways produces it, reproduces it. So, I have for a long time critiqued this system and these structures, because I do think they do offer more harm than the good that they are trying to or claiming to do.

I think that this is a complex that renders the causes of global inequality invisible, hiding the ways that often U.S. policies, U.S. trade agreements and other forms of sort of extractive capitalism are often the causes of these crises, these challenges that people around the world have, that then aid steps in to help or to solve. But, in fact, it’s not solving it at all, because it’s making sure that we never, ever are asking questions: Why is it that the United States has the resources, has the power to help in this way, while other people are often suffering in ways that are caused by the U.S.’s own policies?

And it’s that sort of paradox that I was trying to grapple with, because, of course, suddenly taking away what are in fact necessary, as we just heard earlier in the show, necessary programs that help people who need help, is certainly just a bull in a china shop and doing, again, only harm. So, it is, for me, a complicated paradox, because if I argued for any kind of changes, it would be that a country like the U.S. should be offering reparations for the climate damage that they’ve done in the Global South in the interest of their own economies, in the interest of their own lifestyle. And certainly, one would like to see a sort of thoughtful set of plans and questions around what is it — what is it that a country like the U.S. is doing to produce this kind of inequality, to produce or reproduce the inability of countries like South Africa, for example, in making its own HIV medication and providing it to its people.

And so, there is this danger, I think, of — produced by the humanitarian-industrial complex that allows people to go, “Well, we’re doing the right thing. We’re doing a good thing,” but allows them to feel OK about their implication, their participation in a system that, in fact, helps to produce and reproduce that poverty or that inequality.

AMY GOODMAN: You have worked with USAID-funded projects in adult literacy and voter education in South Africa. And you write that the work was largely dependent on Western donor funding, but, quote, “it always came with strings, especially the money from USAID.” What kind of strings are you talking about? How do you think USAID’s goal is ultimately about supporting the U.S. economy? And that’s a really interesting point. People may not realize, for example, that millions and millions of dollars go to peanut farmers in the United States to provide a substance that goes to babies and children to fight malnutrition, but the money doesn’t go to those other countries. It goes directly to the farmers in the U.S.

KATHRYN MATHERS: Exactly. And certainly, USAID does not make any — is not deluded about this. It works in the interest of the United States and of the U.S. economy and of its own sort of sense of self in the world, at least before this month. But a large, a large amount of its budget, small as it is, in fact, as you just described, goes back to U.S. industries, to U.S. farmers, to U.S. manufacturers. And even with a small project like ours, which is not buying anything, so we get to use that — we got to use that money on our programming, a large amount of it goes to the auditors in D.C., for example. So, it is a sort of cycle of, you know, we’re giving you money for this, but much of it ends up coming back to the U.S. And in fact, it does its job of supporting sort of U.S. interests, to a large degree.

The other sort of set of strings, in a way, was that it was never really possible for an organization like us to just do our work. Project Literacy had a sustainable, working structure that was doing really good adult basic education, literacy, numeracy, financial education. But to just get funding from an agency like USAID, and it’s certainly not unique in this way, was almost impossible. You know, give us funding to do the work we really do. We can prove we do it. It’s really successful. And so, every six months, you’re writing funding proposals that are bending our work into the current sexy language about what matters in aid or development. And what matters in aid or development is decided in D.C., in New York, in London, in Geneva. It’s not decided on the ground where people are doing the work. And there’s this reluctance to support that.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Professor Mathers, about the history of critiquing USAID in many parts of the world, when it’s been used, for example, as a front for the CIA. I’d like to mention a couple of examples from Latin America. Back in 2010, USAID covertly funded a Twitter-like social media platform in Cuba to spark a “Cuban Spring,” with the hope of bringing down the government. Last week, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Greg Grandin spoke to Al Jazeera’s UpFront about USAID. This is what he said.

GREG GRANDIN: AID is a perfect expression of a kind of — the fusion of hard and soft power. I mean, it does all of — it does important and humane work and, I think, was funding the only working hospital left in Gaza, things like that, and dispensing medicines in Africa, but it was also the agency in which — that funded “democracy promotion” programs. And these were all — you know, when the National Endowment for Democracy, which operates under AID, was founded in 1983 under the Reagan administration, the first director of it said, “We do in the open what the CIA used to do covertly,” meaning that they fund oppositional groups. … When in countries that are out-and-out, you know, dissenting from U.S. hegemony — say, Bolivia — you fund these organizations that basically raise the alarm that the country is heading toward dictatorship, and, you know, it manipulates the press. You know, in Bolivia, the reason why that coup didn’t take hold is because Evo Morales kicked out AID.

AMY GOODMAN: And you also have, for example, Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive saying among the most infamous examples of USAID funding was the Office of Public Safety, a USAID police training program in the Southern Cone that also trained torturers. We only have 20 seconds. It’s not your total focus, but your thoughts on how it’s been used?

KATHRYN MATHERS: I mean, I don’t have doubt that it’s been used that way. I have no evidence of that. It’s certainly in the conversation in South Africa, for example. People would make those accusations and be frustrated about that. But I’m more interested in the way that this kind of agency shuts down South Africa’s ability to solve its own problems. It doesn’t support that ability.

AMY GOODMAN: I think that is key. And we’re going to link to the articles you write. Professor Kathryn Mathers at Duke University, thank you so much. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.