The well-known failures of foreign aid - machines rusting in fields for want of simple spares, supplies never reaching the right people, corrupt leaders lining their pockets - are only the tip of the iceberg. All too often foreign aid can become an instrument of harm that plunders the environment, increases human suffering and even violates the human rights that we, who sit at home, think we are helping. The villains seem to be the huge energy projects, especially the hydro-electric dams, driving people from their land, destroying their cultures and trampling on religious rights. The perpetrators are not the individuals who approve these vast projects but the process that permits these atrocities to occur - a process that is tainted at every step of the way, from the role of our own governments to that of the governments in the Third World.