Do no harm – that idea is broadly derived from medical contexts, where it first was phrased like this in the 16th century and was used to make medics aware of the possible dangers any treatment could contain and compare those dangers to the dangers and benefits of instead not intervening (A bit more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First,_do_no_harm).
For volunteers and professionals in any kind of helping situation, this was and still is a hard learned lesson.
Just ‘helping’ by giving food to starving people can create a backslash on local food economy and thus create future dependencies for foreign food supplies. It can also lead to people getting used to the taste of non-local food and changing their taste-preferences, again hurting local sustainable food economy.
For this very reason and to prevent problems like these, the European Commission created a Code of Conduct for food aid donors and organisations. View full article »
