FOM Newsletter November 2001

No Time to Be Shortchanging Foreign Aid

By Judy Mann

Wednesday, November 14, 2001; Page C12

Susana de la Torre was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco from 1987 to 1989. On the evening of Sept. 11, the first e-mail she received was from her Moroccan "family." They knew that her husband worked for the Department of the Army and that the family lived near the Pentagon.

"They had tried for several hours to call me by phone," de la Torre told me, "but had been unsuccessful and then resorted to e-mailing. I simply cried when I got their e-mail, and I was moved -- though not surprised -- at the depth of their caring for me and my family. They contacted us way before many family members ever did to inquire about our safety."

De la Torre, who is now a public health nurse working with pregnant teenagers, and her husband have twice returned to Morocco to visit her "family." She is Christian. Her husband is Jewish.

"The Peace Corps experience profoundly changes those who serve and the people with whom we form friendships in those countries," she says. "We may not move mountains, but we move hearts."

Few who have served in the Peace Corps could have failed to notice that their agency did not get a call in Atlanta last week when President Bush urged Americans to help our country by doing more volunteering.

Isolationists in the Republican Party have spent years gutting foreign aid programs. House Republicans have held our dues payment to the United Nations hostage to their narrow-minded, provincial views on international family planning. Only recently did the House agree to pay $582 million in arrears to the United Nations. While the world grows more dangerous, our budget for foreign aid is less than it was 15 years ago.

This year, Congress has set a cap of $15.3 billion on the foreign aid budget, but nearly a third of that goes to Egypt and Israel. That leaves about $10 billion to provide economic support to poor countries, to help feed and shelter refugees, to combat AIDS and other health problems and to help develop infrastructure that can lead to stability.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee for foreign operations, says the foreign aid budget is not nearly enough, and he's right. In an Oct. 31 floor speech on countering terrorism, he pointed out that it boils down to less than $40 for each American each year. "We are failing the American people, and we are failing future generations," he said.

He went on to say: "We have to go to the source of the problem, and that is to countries that are failing -- from AIDS, from ignorance, from poverty, from injustice.

"We need a better understanding of the world we live in and how to protect our security."

And then he gave the numbers: 70 percent of the world's population is nonwhite, non-Christian and illiterate; half of the people living in the world today suffer from malnutrition. But a privileged 5 percent own more than half the world's wealth.

Leahy believes that we should be spending at least five times as much on foreign aid as we are. "Let us act like a superpower," he said. "Let us lead the world in combating poverty, in supporting the development of democracy. Let us start paying our share."

We are nowhere close to doing that, and the foreign aid budget that is likely to emerge from the House-Senate conference this week will be another stingy drop in the bucket. But the House, demonstrating its usual skewed priorities, wants to spend an additional $657 million on the Colombian drug war, on top of the $1.3 billion appropriated last year. The program is not only wrongheaded, but apparently it's an administrative nightmare.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pointed out in a floor debate that of the $119 million appropriated for reforms in Colombia, only $8 million has been spent. Leahy said that his committee has repeatedly asked the administration where the billion dollars in appropriated funds have gone and that the response he's gotten has been: "We don't know, but we will check into that."

While we are bombing Colombian peasants with herbicide, we are ignoring the 1.2 billion of the world's people who are eking out an existence on the equivalent of $1 a day. One hundred million of the world's children, two-thirds of them girls, don't go to school.

Do aid programs work? You bet. Since the United States started a literacy program in 1991 in Nepal, the literacy rate for adult women has jumped from 22 percent to 40 percent. Even with the miserly assistance provided, infant mortality rates have decreased by 10 percent in countries aided by the United States. This means more than 4 million children have lived who otherwise would have died.

Led by Leahy, the Senate has taken money from the Colombia drug war and redistributed it so that it provides $20 million more than the House for refugee assistance, $70 million more for AIDS and $40 million more for family planning, for example. The Senate wants to spend $147 million more for development assistance and $123 million more for child survival and health programs than the House does. If the House is suddenly seized by an attack of good sense, the Senate version, meager as it is, will prevail.

Our foreign aid budget needs to grow, and we need to put first-rate people in charge of the agencies administering it. We are far from the mark. Today the Senate is scheduled to hold confirmation hearings on the nomination of Gaddi H. Vasquez to be the director of the Peace Corps. Vasquez, who was a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors that oversaw its plunge into $1.7 billion of bankruptcy, has no qualifications other than contributing $100,000 to the Republican National Committee.

The Peace Corps has been an ambassador of goodwill for this country, and now more than ever before, such programs deserve our political and financial support. But at the very time when sophisticated, well-financed foreign aid programs may be the best fire wall against global terrorism, the United States is the leading deadbeat dad.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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