Why aid spending criticism is badly mistaken

The call for Ireland’s overseas aid to be spent mostly on Irish products (Letters, Feb 20) is badly mistaken.

Insisting that money given by Ireland could only be spent on Irish produce is the same as dumping our surplus into a poor country. In the case of food, that would only be to the detriment of local farmers in that country — often the very people we’re trying to help.

Rice farmers in Haiti, for example, struggled to sell their rice in their own country after the 2010 earthquake because their local markets were flooded with subsidised surplus rice from the United States. The result? More poverty, not less.