Uses of Foreign Assistance
Dramatic spikes in food and energy prices and the escalating effects of climate change have heightened awareness of the plight of more than 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty. In a little less than two years, the number of people in poverty has increased by a hundred million and the number who are hungry by 75 million.4 Getting by on a diet of basic staples, such as corn, rice, or sorghum (and very little else), poor families were spending half or more of their income on food even before the jump in food prices.
By any definition, an extra hundred million people plunged into poverty is a humanitarian emergency that demands an immediate response. Rich and poor countries as well as U.N. food agencies and international financial institutions such as the World Bank have all begun to mobilize, and the right response must go beyond simply providing food.
The global hunger crisis might have been averted by greater investments over the years in improving agricultural productivity in developing countries. Both intentionally and by default, rich countries, poor countries, and multilateral institutions made choices not to invest in agriculture. As we saw in Chapter 2, not investing development resources in agriculture is a sure way to miss the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of cutting hunger in half. The vast majority of the world’s poor people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture either directly or indirectly for their livelihood.
The United States has always responded generously to emergencies and crises abroad (e.g. providing relief after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami), and our country continues to provide essential lifesaving humanitarian assistance. But equally important in responding to the global hunger crisis—and preventing it from happening again—is to refocus U.S. foreign assistance programs and provide better development assistance. U.S. development assistance could have taken a proactive, preventive approach over the years by addressing the root cause of the global hunger crisis—poverty.
Too much of the non-emergency assistance the United States gives is driven not by the goal of reducing poverty but by U.S. political and security objectives. These objectives may be important in their own right, but their pursuit does not always benefit poor people, and their effectiveness should not be judged as if that were their purpose. No one would argue that peace in the Middle East is unimportant, for example, but of the billions of dollars of assistance the United States has provided to Egypt, most has not been used to help the vast majority of Egyptians escape from grinding poverty.
U.S. foreign assistance has three main purposes: humanitarian, political, and development. Humanitarian assistance responds to natural and man-made disasters (e.g. the Indian Ocean tsunami) and ongoing crises like Darfur. U.S. national security interests drive much of the political aid (e.g. counter-narcotics in Latin America, peace in the Middle East, the war on terror, military training). Development assistance programs, designed to reduce poverty and encourage economic growth in low-income countries, include programs for agriculture, health, family planning, education, the environment, and democracy and governance. By and large, the development component of U.S. foreign assistance has been effective, particularly where there has been a long-term commitment of resources and a partnering relationship with the host government. South Korea and Taiwan, formerly recipients of large amounts of U.S. development assistance, are now economic powerhouses and partners in global security. India, another recipient of U.S. development assistance, has gone from chronic food deficits in the 1960s to food exports and sustained economic growth in recent decades. U.S. development assistance was instrumental in the eradication of smallpox. Through PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—the United States has placed more than two million people on lifesaving anti-retroviral medication. Despite these and other successes, in recent years U.S. development assistance has lacked a coherent strategy. Put simply, the overarching goals of U.S. development assistance are unclear. While UN agencies, multilateral agencies like the World Bank, and donor countries such as the United Kingdom have adopted the MDGs as the framework for their assistance, the United States has been reluctant to do so. Yet the MDGs are widely understood and accepted targets of human development—e.g. reducing the number of people in poverty, reducing mortality rates for children under five, increasing girls’ enrollment in school—and could serve as an unambiguous indicator of aid effectiveness.
By the same standard, non-emergency foreign assistance given primarily for political reasons should have its own measures of effectiveness. Have the billions of dollars in aid given to Egypt since the Camp David accords been effective? Maybe not by developmental standards. But absolutely if measured by the absence of war between Egypt and Israel. Much of the criticism of foreign assistance as ineffective and wasteful is because political and development goals are intermixed. Such confusion erodes public support for spending tax dollars on international development.
