World Bank Chief Treads New Ground in US By Lesley Wroughton
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is the World Bank (news - web sites)'s biggest shareholder, and bank president James Wolfensohn wants Americans to know where their dollars are going.
For the first time in his nine years as head of the international institution that gives development money to poor countries, Wolfensohn is touring college campuses and school auditoriums to explain why American money is so crucial in alleviating global poverty in the post Sept. 11 environment.
In an interview with Reuters, Wolfensohn said what he found was that Americans were focused on domestic issues and have little knowledge of global development matters.
"I'm overawed by the extent of the challenge because the ignorance in many parts of the country is enormous," said the Australian-born Wolfensohn, who is a U.S. citizen.
"On the other hand, I'm encouraged by the interest in the places we went."
Wolfensohn said the Sept. 11 attacks, blamed on the al Qaeda group harbored by Afghanistan (news - web sites)'s former Taliban rulers, forced Americans to learn about issues and places they rarely glanced at. In the process, he said, they became exposed to the need for the development work by the bank.
"September 11 was a visible example of how events that took place in Afghanistan, which harbored terrorists, turn up on Wall Street. Before that, very few people in this country knewabout Afghanistan.
"They knew about fundamentalism but it was not an issue that impinged on life in the United States, they didn't know about terror because that was something that happened in North Africa and happened in some places in Europe, but it wasn't an American experience."
CAUSE FOR INSTABILITY
In his travels, mainly in the south and western United States, Wolfensohn said he told audiences not to let the U.S-led war on terror make them forget the fight against global poverty, which would leave poor societies without hope and vulnerable to instability.
"Unless we do something about the issue of equity and the issue of hope, there is very little way that you can have stability or even peace," he said.
Wolfensohn spewed out global poverty figures and the yawning gap between rich and poor with ease to show why he thinks Americans -- and the rest of the world -- should care.
In a world of 6 billion people, 1 billion own 80 percent of global resources, while another 1 billion struggle to survive on a dollar a day, he noted.
Then there is the demographics threat he refers to as the freight train coming down the tracks: the 2 billion more people that will crowd the planet over the next 25 years, but of which only 50 million will be in the richer countries.
Such statistics show why Americans need to know more about challenges for helping the poor, Wolfensohn said.
Developing countries should tackle corruption and spend more on the poor, he said, with wealthier countries helping by giving more money and dismantling trade barriers.
Jeffrey Sachs, a US economist and special advisor to U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan (news - web sites), said Wolfensohn has a point.
"Americans are told very little about this and would be interested if they knew more," said Sachs.
"The fact of the matter is that the United States is the least generous of all donor countries in the world when we measure development assistance and the share of our national income," he said. He called this "indefensible" and said informing the public was important.
U.S. development aid was about 0.13 percent of the country's gross national income in 2002, while in comparison, Sweden gave 0.83 percent and Norway 0.89 percent.
President Bush (news - web sites) has increased spending to fight the AIDS (news - web sites) epidemic, committing $15 billion over five years to treat and prevent the disease, tripling US spending overseas.
He has also promised $1 billion to a Millennium Challenge Account that provides assistance to countries that commit to democratic, economic and human rights reforms.
Created in 1947 with its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund (news - web sites), the World Bank offers loans and advice to more than 100 developing countries and provided $18.5 billion in 2003 to fight poverty.
The U.S. has pushed for reforms in the World Bank to provide more grants, as opposed to loans.