Custom «Philanthropies Gone Bad» Essay Paper Sample

Charity can be a word used in every religious sense to be helping and loving others. Act out of the love for people is the inner meaning that the word philanthropy reminds one. The obvious deference of being charitable and philanthropist seems to be the former can be poor, while the latter is often bound to be extremely rich. Love of the people by the reach is often becomes too efficient and effective and therefore becomes destructive. Philanthropic organizations around the world are created for the support and care of the humanity or at least the people of its own community. They often establish and maintain fund for educational and cultural development. They have funds for anything that seems to be in the interest of the human race for example ‘Environmental Defense Fund is putting major resources into creating new incentives to bring developing economies into the battle to control climate change, as well as develop policy frameworks to encourage the key emitters to take action on climate change. The grant will allow it to develop its international work’ (Robertshow 1).

  They always have financial resources to maintain the life style and financial status of the community or the society. The philanthropy works in partnerships with organizations that bring together strong management and new ideas to come up with innovative solutions to create concrete change. This innovation is what causes the all time positive notion to be bad. Then the whole scenario changes and the world find it moving against the good of the people.

This paper aims at making a skillful study on those projects which were originally thought or intended to be philanthropies. The world had seen great solace in it at the beginning and eventually found the evil or the folly in them. The human rights are being recognized and accepted in all the societies on the face of the earth, but still people live, in many parts of the world, deprived of their basic needs. This phenomenon has been keenly observed and thought over by the genuine people, who would like to make a difference, and they plan, they implement and at times when the action is aimed at a massive change, its impact may vary. The following study will concentrate on unearthing a few of those projects which were thought by everyone as some thing that would change the world for better and later on discovered it to be a real scandal, mistake or problem that needed investigation.

Saving Humanity Becomes One of the Greatest Scandals

Global warming is a phenomenon about which every barely literate man is aware and concerned about. In a most positive move during the past six years, the President of the United States devoted nearly $29 billion to climate research, leading the world with its unparalleled financial commitment (The White House). The world with all the ordinary people in it is grateful about it. At the same time, there arises a question about it, Were the decisions concerning this enormous funding for global warming research taken out of genuine concern that the climate is allegedly changing as a result of CO2 industrial emissions, or do some other disclosed ideas stand behind this money? (Jaworowski 39). Thus, the concern at the top about the climate change always does not seem to be genuine. There are always hidden motives behind this global warming hysteria that is being promoted around the world. Jawrowski goes on explaining them. Meanwhile, coming back to the whole issue

Few truths about the issue

Maurice Strong, Whose initiative ignited the green movement, and later on became the senior adviser to Kofi Annan the UN Secretary General and chaired the UN conference on environment and development, had dropped out of school at 14. He stated at the conference addressing the world of bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians that we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse. He also further exhorted for quest of poverty. . . reduced resource consumption . . . and set levels of mortality control (Jaworowski 40).

Timothy Wirth, US then secretary of states for Global Issues supported strong saying that we have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy (Jaworowski 40).

Now the concern anyone would have is that when the studies have almost proven the global warming, in itself, is not as fatal a threat as it seems, what is the purpose of promoting it and warning the developing countries to be on the watch out? What is the hidden agenda behind the expensive researches? 

Mycoherbicide Redux a Boon or a Curse

There is a lot to learn before we directly go into mycoherbicide. The concept of it was for the government to produce a fungus which would only attack the plants of certain drugs. Jeremy Bigwood explains it as fungus which would specify and leave all the plants healthy only affecting the plants of the drugs. It was also believed that this would liger in the soil and remain for a few years during which, if the targeted drug plants such as cocaine, Marijuana and poppy plants, were not planted it would die of without any harm to any other beings or species. They believed the complete, illicit drug control for the world. It was considered to be the end of the drug problem once for all.

In reality, the mycoherbicide was a little more than they thought it would be. Usually the chemical herbicides made in the factory, when applied to the plant, would do their job and degrade. The mycoherbicide, on the other hand, would remain ready to kill and stunt, never degrading. The toxin that was produced by the mycoherbicides was discovered only after thousands of people dying after eating bread made from the contaminated grain mainly in Russia and in different parts of the world. Soviet scientists isolated and identified the responsible Fusarium species and extracted from it a new series of mycotoxins.

The surprising move was when again US considered the research and experiments on the mycoherbicides. This was a surprising move for the love of the society when the mycoherbicides are illegal under the Biological Weapons Convention, especially in foreign countries; President Clinton waived the use of mycoherbicides in Plan Colombia for precisely this reason. The Andean Community, through the Andean Committee of Environmental Authorities, flatly rejected the use of Fusarium oxysporum for drug crop eradication throughout the region. Afghanistan President Karzai has also repeatedly stated he is unwilling to consider anything other than manual eradication of opium poppy (Bigwood 2006). See how a project that would have been the most useful move for the mankind turned out to be a curse.

Katrina Efforts Investigated by Red Cross

A helping hand in disaster is most philanthropic and noble act anybody could possibly imagine. That is what exactly the hundreds of people did as volunteers in the catastrophe. Their love for those who suffered great losses and their sacrifices can never be over looked. The American Red Cross, in fact, received the largest amount of donations after the disaster. What amazes one is the fact that even at the face of such tragedy the man, in front of wealth, becomes just another man and completely forgets the human values. There is no known official estimate of the cash or the value of supplies that might have been misappropriated, but the Red Cross received roughly 60 percent of the $3.6 billion that Americans donated for hurricane relief efforts.

The investigations, after several weeks, failed to produce much result as a volunteer from Louisiana stated on the New York Times that though there was little direct evidence of criminal activity, the volunteers said the magnitude of the missing goods had convinced them that Red Cross operations were being manipulated for private gain (New York Times).

The Threat Palm Oil Pose

The palm-oil industry has set up 6.5 million hectares of oil-palm plantations across Sumatra and Borneo, only have to be born and brought up in such a place to know the comfort of job opportunity they give to the local people. Sumatra now has more than 4 million hectares of oil-palm plantations and beyond doubt it is a blessing for the local people. This holy act however has another side which talks about the loss of invaluable habitat of Sumatra. Indonesian palm oil industries are invading these islands. It is worth remembering at this point that Indonesia has one of the highest rates of forest loss in the world.

Palm oil has gained a great demand especially in Europe and allover the world. UK supermarkets are major end-users of palm oil. Tesco sells hundreds of products that contain palm oil, including its own-brand bread and crisps. As the UK’s largest and most profitable supermarket, Tesco should play a leading role in driving demand for palm oil from nondestructive sources. By September 2005 neither Tesco nor any of the other major UK supermarkets were able to give assurance that the palm oil they use is sourced from such places, and none had joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (Buckland 2006). This has in fact resulted in relief in some other part of the world. But the question is this relief worth loss of ecology? Can this phenomenon be legally supported? 

This paper is an effort to bring out the fact that philanthropy is a quality and action which absolutely needs to be generated for the love of people. There are many factors that affect the action to turn it into destructive effort. Some of it occurs unintentionally as a part or after effect of the project and some are strategically made to work on a hidden objective.