Global Policy Forum

Amid Prosperity, Country Is World's
Least Generous in Helping Poor

By Karen DeYoung

Washington - While the United States enjoyed one of its most prosperous decades ever in the 1990s, it also set a record for stinginess. For as long as people have kept track, never has the country given a smaller share of its money to the world's poorest. Although the size of its economy makes the United States a major foreign aid donor - and Americans as individuals are generous givers to domestic and foreign emergencies - the country is the most parsimonious in the world when its charity is measured as a fraction of available riches.

In 1997, the U.S. government spent about $7 billion on traditional, nonmilitary foreign aid, or less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the $8.1 trillion gross national product. That was the lowest percentage of any donor country and less than half the proportion that the United States spent just 10 years earlier. But it is far from the only country giving less; declining generosity has become a worldwide trend. Overall, international foreign assistance has fallen sharply since the end of the Cold War, dropping 21 percent in inflation-adjusted terms between 1992 and 1997. The reasons for the decline are not hard to find.

Critics have long said that foreign assistance was wasted by bloated aid agencies pouring money into the pockets of corrupt Third World governments. When the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, Western powers no longer felt the need to purchase the Cold War loyalty of such governments. With a less threatening world beyond their borders, donor nations came under pressure to attend to problems at home. "All they want is to give the taxpayers' money away to foreign countries and be damned what happens at home," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said in a floor speech this month as Congress slashed President Bill Clinton's foreign aid budget request.

The shrinking amount of aid has imposed a rigid new calculus on where the assistance goes. Major natural disasters and strategically important trouble spots - Turkish earthquakes, Balkan wars and Middle East peace agreements - have continued to attract international largess, particularly when television cameras are on hand to broadcast the need and document the good deeds. The principal loser in this equation has been Africa, where the impact of declining funds and shifting priorities is felt in increasingly scarce resources to combat hunger, homelessness and disease. United Nations aid agencies, which depend on voluntary contributions from member nations, are the primary dispensers of assistance to Africa. This year, donors have provided less than three-fifths of the $800 million UN request for emergencies in sub-Saharan Africa. The target had already been reduced by nearly a third from last year after donors complained it was too high.

In September, the World Food Program announced it would curtail its feeding program for nearly 2 million refugees in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea after receiving less than 20 percent of the requested funding. An emergency appeal during the summer to feed and shelter at least 600,000 Angolans who had been displaced in that country's long-standing civil war, a number nearly equal to Kosovo's refugees of last spring, brought minimal initial response and predictions of mass starvation. In Africa's Great Lakes region of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, where overlapping wars have been raging for years, nearly 4 million people are crowded into refugee camps or hiding in the hills far from roads and towns. Nearly all farmers or herders are without land and livestock and in many cases without access to health services or other humanitarian assistance. This year, the United Nations estimated it would need $278 million to take care of them. By late October, only 45 percent of that amount had been donated. Africa also has been largely bypassed by the mushrooming flows of private investment funds that have offset the decline in foreign aid in other regions, such as East Asia and Latin America, where investors have seen better potential returns.

Africa's problems seem an old story, with disasters declared with dulling regularity, victims located far from anyone's strategic ken or camera range, savage wars and governments that rob their own people. Because things seem to have become worse, rather than better, critics of foreign aid tend to view money sent to Africa as wasted. But to the proponents and practitioners of foreign aid, this depressing logic condemns the world's most needy to falling ever further behind precisely because they have been unable to get ahead. It is, said Mark Malloch Brown, director of the UN Development Program, "a very Darwinian situation."

The 1990s have been a demoralizing decade for the professional aid community - those in government, multinational and private agencies who determine where funds are needed and how they should be spent, lobby donors to come up with the money and deliver the aid to the field. Not only was overall funding down, but the largest aid undertakings were notorious failures. In Somalia, a combined military-humanitarian intervention collapsed in lethal firefights and recrimination. In Bosnia, programs to feed the victims of atrocities became a grotesque smoke screen to conceal the lack of political will to stop the killings. In the case of Rwanda, the international community ended up feeding and supplying the perpetrators of genocide. The aid agencies got much of the blame. If they couldn't succeed in places like Somalia and Rwanda, where the money was flowing freely, why give them more?

After Rwanda, said Francisco Hochschild, special assistant to the UN humanitarian coordinator, Sergio Vieira de Mello, "budgets started shrinking." But then, Mr. Hochschild said, "Kosovo turned up to save everybody." If the selection of those deserving of foreign assistance is "Darwinian," then the people of Kosovo are among the world's fittest. The survival and safe return of 730,000 Kosovo Albanians was "one of the most spectacular reverse population movements in contemporary history," the UN high commissioner for refugees, Sadako Ogata, said last summer. But in fundamental ways, Kosovo confirmed the worst fears of aid officials - that they have become active participants in a process that concentrates assistance on the most strategically located and widely televised crises, often at the expense of the most needy.

The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Kosovo refugees and the crush of aid agencies eager to spend it "was almost an obscenity," said Randolph Kent, who worked with the United Nations in the Balkans until last summer, when he became the coordinator of UN aid programs for Somalia. Some aid workers called the Kosovo Albanians "the Pampers refugees" in an exaggerated reference to material comforts unavailable to Africans. The need in Kosovo was undeniably large and urgent. But many aid officials acknowledged that a large part of their eagerness came from "the CNN effect" - the symbiotic relationship among donor governments, foreign aid agencies and television.

The aid agencies know they are in a business that must justify its existence in ways that those supplying the money can see and approve. Television coverage both reflects and promotes high-level donor interest, so aid agencies' activities tend to follow the cameras. CARE officials discussed taking a pass lest they harm their other development programs in Latin America, South Asia and Africa. But the idea was quickly discarded. CARE concluded it must have a presence in Kosovo or it would be downgraded in the eyes of donors watching to see their money in action - and deciding where to put their money in the future. "Donors, both private and government, expected us to be there," said the CARE USA president, Peter Bell. President Clinton held a meeting with the leading agencies to emphasize his own enthusiasm for aid to Kosovo.

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