A rchive Date
[ 28-01-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Ottawa/Michael_Harris/2005/01/28/912462.html
Charity begins with self-interest
By MICHAEL HARRIS - For the Ottawa Sun
Fri, January 28, 2005
The other day I paid $5 and bought a black leather bracelet embossed with the date "12/26 04" and bearing the words: "Give Love." The bracelets were being sold to raise money for the Tsunami Relief Fund.
Since another infamous date, 9/11 changed the world, no one should be surprised that Dec. 26, with at least 50 times the victims, is already changing the planet in some fundamental ways. The issue raised by Dec. 26 is international aid and all that it implies - how we give help to the world's poor and what we plan to do about the 1 billion people on earth who live on less than a dollar a day who have not been the victims of natural disasters.
The tsunami catastrophe put the odd business of trying to be our brother's keeper into sharp focus. Ten years ago at the Brazil Earth Summit, the industrialized countries, including the United States, promised to increase foreign aid levels to at least 0.7% of gross domestic product, (GDP). That pledge was renewed in 2002 by many world leaders, including President Bush. Only five countries kept or exceeded the promise: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Canada and the United States did not.
We give approximately 0.4% of our GDP. The world's richest country, the United States, gives only 0.13%, leaving it dead last in the top 22 donor nations behind Italy and Greece. Only by adding military aid does the U.S. commitment jump to 0.2%, a figure that the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, called "stingy."
Statistics like those, and the sad truth that many of the industrialized countries welched on previous aid pledges in other disasters like the Bam earthquake and Hurricane Mitch, left a bad taste in the mouths of the strongest supporters of the United Nations. So it was with great fanfare this month that the UN released a 3,000-page report under its Millennium Project aimed at lifting 500 million people out of poverty by 2015.
To pay for it, the man who heads up the UN's anti-poverty effort, Jeffrey Sachs, says that the industrialized nations must dig deeper into their pockets, doubling their foreign aid over the next decade. Sachs wants the rich countries to contribute 50c out of each hundred dollars of income to reduce poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease. The South Asia tsunami killed 150,000 in one dramatic fell swoop. Malaria kills that many people every month in Third World countries but there are no headlines and no relief funds and Jeffrey Sachs thinks it's time we did something about that. He estimates that with an investment of $4 billion a year, 1 million human lives could be saved annually.
Sachs' plan has put the United Nations and the U.S. at odds yet again in a way that is even more profound than their differences on the Iraq War. Except in rhetoric, the U.S. takes a very different approach to foreign aid than Jeffrey Sachs, the Scandinavian nations and the UN. The American government does not principally give money for the development needs of poor countries, not to fight hunger, not even for humanitarian disaster relief - only 12% of USAID's budget is reserved for such tragedies. Nor does it withhold aid from countries which have poor human rights records, (Uzbekistan), or that are governed by dictators, (Egypt and Pakistan). For President Bush, (and past presidents Clinton, Bush Sr., and Reagan), U.S. aid is mingled with the nation's foreign and military policy. Guns, if not missiles, usually come with the rice.
In the Reagan years, countries useful in fighting communism got American foreign aid; today, it goes to helpful front line countries supporting the administration's global "war" on terror. When the State Department and USAID put out their 2004-2009 strategic plan, the document defined "security" as the main goal of U.S. foreign assistance. U.S. foreign aid has always been about American national security and global ambitions, not humanitarian development for impoverished nations.
The top aid recipient in 2004 was the country president Bush insists is the main battlefield in the war on terror - Iraq. That country received $18.5 billion in U.S. aid. Israel was next at $2.6 billion, and then came Egypt and Afghanistan at $1.8 billion. If there is any doubt about why countries get U.S. aid, Pakistan resolves it. A bit player as recently as 2001, (it received just $1.7 million in aid that year) Pakistan received $275 million in 2004, as the Bush administration's only Islamic ally in the eye of a fundamentalist storm.
As for measuring the effectiveness of U.S. aid, the administration does something that countries like Denmark and Sweden do not; it ties its assistance to U.S. exports and technical assistance and it does it rather well. Eighty-one percent of its development aid is procured from U.S. sources, 87% of its military aid.
Jeffrey Sachs wants to reform the way the developed world helps the poor: President Bush wants to reform the UN.
It is Iraq all over again without the bombs.
Author, broadcaster and investigative journalist Michael Harris can be heard Monday to Thursday, 1-3 p.m. on 580 CFRA Letters to the editor should be sent to oped@ott.sunpub.com Home Page
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