AmerCon : United States : Indifferent

New York Times
2004.12.23

America, the Indifferent

Author: Editorial

It was with great fanfare that the United States and 188 other countries signed the United
Nations Millennium Declaration, a manifesto to eradicate extreme poverty, hunger and
disease among the one billion people in the world who subsist on barely anything. The
project set a deadline of 2015 to achieve its goals. Chief among them was the goal for
developed countries, like America, Britain and France, to work toward giving 0.7 percent of
their national incomes for development aid for poor countries.

Almost a third of the way into the program, the latest available figures show that the
percentage of United States income going to poor countries remains near rock bottom:
0.14 percent. Britain is at 0.34 percent, and France at 0.41 percent. (Norway and Sweden,
to no one's surprise, are already exceeding the goal, at 0.92 percent and 0.79 percent.)

And we learned this week that in the last two months, the Bush administration has reduced
its contributions to global food aid programs aimed at helping hungry nations become
self-sufficient, and it has told charities like Save the Children and Catholic Relief Services
that it won't honor earlier promises. Instead, administration officials said that most of the
country's emergency food aid would go to places where there were immediate crises.

Something's not right here. The United States is the world's richest nation. Washington is
quick to say that it contributes more money to foreign aid than any other country. But no
one is impressed when a billionaire writes a $50 check for a needy family. The test is the
percentage of national income we give to the poor, and on that basis this country is the
stingiest in the Group of Seven industrialized nations.

The administration has cited the federal budget deficit as the reason for its cutback in
donations to help the hungry feed themselves. In fact, the amount involved is a pittance
within the federal budget when compared with our $412 billion deficit, which has been
fueled by war and tax cuts. The administration can conjure up $87 billion for the fighting in
Iraq, but can it really not come up with more than $15.6 billion - our overall spending on
development assistance in 2002 - to help stop an 8-year-old AIDS orphan in Cameroon
from drinking sewer water or to buy a mosquito net for an infant in Sierra Leone?

There is a very real belief abroad that the United States, which gave 2 percent of its
national income to rebuild Europe after World War II, now engages with the rest of the
world only when it perceives that its own immediate interests are at stake. If that is unfair,
it's certainly true that American attention is mainly drawn to international hot spots. After
the Sept. 11 bombings, Washington ratcheted up aid to Pakistan to help fight the war on
terror. Just last week, it began talks aimed at contributing more aid to the Palestinians to
encourage them to stop launching suicide bombers at Israel.

Here's a novel idea: how about giving aid before the explosion, not just after?

At the Monterey summit meeting on poverty in 2002, President Bush announced the
Millennium Challenge Account, which was supposed to increase the United States'
assistance to poor countries that are committed to policies promoting development. Mr.
Bush said his government would donate $1.7 billion the first year, $3.3 billion the second
and $5 billion the third. That $5 billion amount would have been just 0.04 percent of
America's national income, but the administration still failed to match its promise with action.

Back in Washington and away from the spotlight of the summit meeting, the administration
didn't even ask Congress for the full $1.7 billion the first year; it asked for $1.3 billion,
which Congress cut to $1 billion. The next year, the administration asked for $2.5 billion
and got $1.5 billion.

Worst of all, the account has yet to disperse a single dollar, while every year in Africa,
one in 16 pregnant women still die in childbirth, 2.2 million die of AIDS, and 2 million
children die from malaria.

Jeffrey Sachs, the economist appointed by Kofi Annan to direct the Millennium Project, puts
the gap between what America is capable of doing and what it actually does into stark relief.

The government spends $450 billion annually on the military, and $15 billion on
development help for poor countries, a 30-to-1 ratio that, as Mr. Sachs puts it, shows how
the nation has become "all war and no peace in our foreign policy." Next month, he will
present his report on how America and the world can actually cut global poverty in half by
2015. He says that if the Millennium Project has any chance of success, America must lead
the donors.

Washington has to step up to the plate soon. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it is
nowhere even near the table now, and the world knows it.

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