Down the Rat Hole
EBERSTADT, NICHOLAS
Down the Rat Hole by Nicholas Eberstadt Brian atwood announced the shocking news himself: According to preliminary figures, the United States appeared to have fallen to third place among...
...If recipient countries were actually developing, at some point they would no longer need or qualify for aid: They would "graduate," as one says in aid-speak...
...The American public is generous by nature and, according to poll after poll, strongly supports such international humanitarian objectives as ending world hunger...
...Down the Rat Hole by Nicholas Eberstadt Brian atwood announced the shocking news himself: According to preliminary figures, the United States appeared to have fallen to third place among aid-giving governments in terms of total outlays of "official development assistance...
...His rueful comparison of the American and French programs implicitly posits that the volume of money transferred to recipient Third World governments is the measure of success in foreign aid policy: The bigger the transfer, the better the program...
...Even within that safe haven for progressive causes known as the Clinton administration, pragmatic officials now discuss their country's foreign aid operations with a thinly veiled contempt...
...For in highlighting the stagnation and decline in American fiscal commitments for foreign aid, he ineluctably drew attention to the most obvious reason for the current program's budgetary woes: namely, its almost total lack of public support...
...When pressed, AID's defenders invariably explain that the answers to these questions are really very complicated...
...Perhaps surprisingly, it does not fare that much better inside the Beltway...
...Over the quarter century between 1970 and 1995, as it happens, there were virtually no "graduates" from America's overall aid program...
...The program is wildly-and if anything, increasingly-unpopular with the average citizen...
...If Americans will not tolerate unending dependence upon federal largesse on the part of their fellow citizens, is it really a surprise that they are reluctant to underwrite it for foreign governments...
...Atwood is administrator of the Agency for International Development and a Clinton appointee, and it was his bitter duty to inform the world that in 1995 America's total expenditures on non-military aid programs were not only lower than Japan's, but a bit smaller than France's as well...
...Now, think about that," Atwood intoned at a special press conference (in Paris) on May 7. "I mean, France is a country of [only] 60 million people...
...Those in search of a simple answer, however, might begin by examining Atwood's own words in Paris...
...But Americans don't want to...
...To anyone not specially trained to see steady Western transfer payments to Third World states as proof in itself that aid is "working," however, the record of "development assistance" policies reads like an extended case study on systemic failure-and has for at least a generation...
...Our economy is five and a half times the size of France's, and yet, in gross terms and absolute terms, they're the number two donor...
...To be a bit simplistic: If development assistance efforts were actually working, we would expect the recipients to develop...
...Although AID has finally unveiled a plan for shutting down a number of its Third World missions in the years to come, this initiative in practice merely shifts a financial and administrative burden to regional AID offices, or to American-funded multilateral aid offices-or to the aid offices of other governments...
...Development Co-operation, the annual report issued on behalf of 21 Western aid-giving governments, offers only three indicators of aid "performance" by donor countries: the total amount of aid given, the share of aid in the contributing country's GNP and the trend in aid spending as against previous years...
...The plain fact is, American taxpayers-more than their counterparts in any other industrial democracy-detest the idea of underwriting anybody's unending financial dependence...
...It is deeply entrenched within the culture of the entire global "development community" today...
...The United States could "afford" to finance a vastly larger foreign-aid program than the one we currently operate...
...Within Congress, a broad bipartisan coalition of skeptics views the current foreign aid program with sentiments ranging from suspicion to disgust...
...Until and unless American "development assistance" policies can be credibly demonstrated to assist in development, AID officials had best get used to revising their "ranking" within the "donor community" downward...
...The United States, moreover, is richer today than ever before: Per capita output in America is now well over twice as high as when we funded the Marshall Plan after World War II...
...In fact, they want to pare back the one they have, because they view the existing program as unworthy of support...
...America's foreign aid program is held in extraordinarily low esteem by the people who pay for it...
...Atwood's remarks are indeed cause for thought- although not perhaps the thoughts he intended...
...Eliciting eventual economic self-reliance in recipient countries was not the motivating intent behind this vaunted reorganization: As Atwood's own speeches and testimony have made clear, the main objective of the exercise is to protect existing programs against further congressional cuts...
...This mindset is by no means peculiar to the current AID administrator...
...Why should the lack of confidence in the government's foreign aid efforts be so pervasive and run so deep...
...Instead, the initially lengthy roster of recipients has been lengthened still further, with the sudden emergence of a host of new aid-seeking entities following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact...
...By such reasoning, it is redundant to inquire about the actual results of aid project spending in a recipient economy-and the amount of money spent is the result...
...In the final analysis, the American public's antipathy toward its government's aid policies is neither an unsolved mystery nor the result of some terrible misunderstanding...
...Nicholas Eberstadt, a researcher with the American Enterprise Institute and Harvard University, is the author of Foreign Aid and American Purpose...
...Why should this be...
...only the most artfully constructed pollster's questions can elicit public approval for it...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 36
