leaving the third world countries alone might just be the best thing for the farmers there. They do not have to compete against all the free food from the civilised world, and get an good incentive to get the agriculture going.
Unfortunately, leaving the third world alone would be very bad at first.
See, if you just look at Africa: With the naturally high infant mortality due to all the jungle diseases and such, Africans have that tendency to produce eight or nine children in the hopes that two or three will reach puberty. Reproduction begins at a young age and continues from there, and they try to have as many children as possible. They need the extra hands because Africa doesn't naturally have beasts of burden, and the terrain didn't inspire invention of the wheel.
But then come the Europeans. We reduced infant mortality, improved health, et cetera, and the population exploded. In response, Africans had to try to produce way more food than is possible in African soil and... now we have famines and epidemics and civil wars and genocides.
Third world countries in the eastern hemisphere are third world because of geography, mostly. The land can't support the number of people there, and the number of people increases with improved medicine.
So if we just left (not that we're doing a whole, whole lot at the moment) the famine and disease and war would become a lot worse... at first. There'd be a period of time before everything balanced out, if that would end up happening at all.
What we really ought to do there is remove governments and rebuild these countries from the ground up. Iraq doesn't need or want our "help." Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, et cetera need and want help. We don't need to militarily occupy any of those nations except to stop the LRA and various civil wars. We just need to encourage and help to build agricultural and technological innovations like
this one.
Farmers need seeds and tools to begin with to produce food, to produce more seeds, and to improve on methods and tools. These societies need free, accessible education.
What they don't need? Religion. Missions do work to improve standard of living in these areas somewhat, but they really think conversion is the number one priority nine times out of ten. Unfortunately, religions who focus on conversion volunteer time and resources, so the government fails to take action beyond giving missions money and protection.
The biggest problem with missions, though? Salem-style "witch" hysteria, destruction of generations-old religious and cultural artifacts, the Lord's Resistance Army, proliferation of the abstinence-until-marriage method of safe sex, et cetera, et cetera.
The people in African countries aren't really competing with the Western world. We send money and food, but most of the time it all gets held up in governments so corrupt they make that guy trying to sell Obama's Senate seat look like frakking George Washington.
Am I the only person who sees the upcoming recession as positive event?
You know, more starving people in third world countries, more homeless people here, job loss, really it's a positive thing. 
In an extremely, extremely big-picture sort of way, recessions can be a good thing. After all, we got the New Deal out of the Great Depression. Massive public works projects and improved infrastructure, etc, etc.
But, really, when you look at it that way, *anything* can be seen as a positive event.
Uhh... I think I am waaayyy off-topic.
