U.S. REJECTS BID TO DOUBLE FOREIGN AID TO POOR LANDS
The Bush administration has rejected an international proposal to double foreign aid in the wake of the war in Afghanistan, contending that poor countries should make better use of the assistance they now receive, the New York Times (A11) reports diplomats said Monday.
The United States insisted at a weekend meeting in New York on global development that specific targets for increasing foreign aid be deleted from a declaration on fighting poverty. At one point during the heated negotiations the United States threatened to cancel plans to have President Bush attend a conference in March, scheduled for Monterrey, Mexico, about how to help poor countries, diplomats said.
The declaration released Monday, intended to be the main communique for the Monterrey meeting, includes no mention of a campaign over several months by European nations, the United Nations and the World Bank to persuade wealthy nations to increase their aid by $50 billion annually, double the current level. Instead, it calls on rich countries to make "concerted efforts" to increase aid.
Though administration officials declined to discuss their negotiating position, they said that Bush has focused for months on improving, rather than increasing, foreign aid. "We were pleased with the way the communique turned out," one White House official said Monday. The official added that an announcement of Bush's plans to attend the Monterrey meeting could come on Tuesday.
The Monterrey meeting was called to find new ways of helping poor countries reduce poverty, cut infant mortality and expand access to education. Some development experts also hoped that wealthy nations would pledge to adopt a longstanding United Nations goal of transferring 0.7 percent of their total economic output to poor countries. Only a handful of countries, including Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, spend that much on aid, though most European nations have promised to do so. The United States would have to devote seven times as much money to foreign aid to reach the target, the story notes.
Also reporting on the Monterrey communiqué, AFP says the text noted "with concern current estimates of dramatic shortfalls in resources required" to meet targets agreed by more than 150 heads of state and government at the UN's Millennium Summit in September 2000.
"Developing countries were all hoping there would be a firm commitment on the part of the industrialized world," Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations, Ahmad Shah, said, adding: "The language has certainly been diluted." But Shah, who co-chaired the negotiations, told reporters that "ODA is
just one of the six areas being addressed as a means of financing development." As far as developing countries are concerned, removing tariff barriers and establishing an equitable trading system is the most important way of reducing the gap between the haves and the have-nots, he said.
In a related commentary, Michel Guillou, director of the Institute of French-speaking communities and globalization of the Lyon III University, writes in Le Figaro (France, p.14) that France is in peril if its universal ideals of freedom, humanism and solidarity are to fade.
French official development aid (ODA) fell from 0.5 percent of GDP to 0.32 percent in five years; in the meantime, its cooperation officers are half less numerous than they were.
Obviously, global and regional international organizations failed in implementing both dialogue and solidarity, which tend to be raised within each geo-cultural area built on the sharing of a main international language, Guillou writes. France must react by bringing back, as of 2003, the 1996 level of ODA, giving back to the unilateral effort all of its place. Moreover, ODA should be spent with priority in a special solidarity area of France's South and French-speaking countries, Guillou adds.
The Washington Post (A18) further comments in an editorial, that the President Bush's State of the Union address this evening presents an opportunity to reiterate his commitment to the war on terrorism. The question Bush needs to address is what kind of action the war on terrorism now requires. Difficult questions loom on military challenges posed by other regimes that harbor terrorists. But there are also two types of effort from which Bush has shrunk. He has not supported the idea of a broad peacekeeping effort in Afghanistan. And he has refused to back a British initiative to increase development assistance by $50 billion a year.
The administration offers a confused mixture of reasons for these omissions. Officials argue that global development assistance should not be increased because its efficacy is unproven; yet at the same time they make a great show of pledging aid to Afghanistan. They say that poverty is not what causes terrorism -- just look at the size of al Qaeda's bank account -- yet they implicitly acknowledge that poverty can create sanctuaries for terrorists when they argue that Afghanistan must be reconstructed. They claim that a renewed commitment to development would be prohibitively expensive. But $50 billion a year represents a fraction of the $300 billion-plus that rich governments spend on subsidizing their farmers annually.
He should also accept that some governments are too poor and feeble to evict terrorist cells, and that in these cases development aid is a tool worth using. In unstable settings, moreover, development aid needs to be supported by a peacekeeping effort that stops the aid from being stolen. Today's warlord-run Afghanistan is one example.
Bush was right when he promised a sustained war, one that requires the United States to use all the tools available. Sufficient support of peace and development should be in the tool kit.
The Christian Science Monitor (p. 6) meanwhile reports that European leaders sent Israel a sharp note of complaint Monday, protesting damage worth more than $15 million that Israeli troops have inflicted recently on European-funded aid projects in Palestinian-ruled territories.
Since the current Intifada began in September 2000, the World Bank estimated recently, the Palestinians have lost some $2.5 billion in gross national income because of the closures, which prevent Palestinians from leaving their towns and villages in search of work or business.