Crumbs for Africa (NYT/IHT)

[Up2Late]

("The piddling amount Bush announced Tuesday is not even 0.007 percent (of GDP...") What a Jerk!)

Crumbs for Africa

The New York Times

THURSDAY, JUNE 9, 2005
President George W. Bush kept a remarkably straight face Tuesday when he strode to the microphones with Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, and told the world that the United States will now get around to spending $674 million in emergency aid that Congress had already approved for needy countries. That's it. Not a penny more to buy treated mosquito nets to help save the thousands of children in Sierra Leone who die every year of preventable malaria. Nothing more to train and pay teachers so 11-year-old girls in Kenya may go to school. And not a cent more to help Ghana develop the kind of programs it needs to get legions of young boys off the streets.

Blair, who will be the host when the Group of Eight, the club of leading economic powers, holds its annual meeting next month, is trying to line up pledges to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. That extra $25 billion a year would do all those things, and much more, to raise the continent from dire poverty. Before getting to Washington, Blair had done very well, securing pledges of large increases from European Union members.

According to a poll, most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent(>0.02%)*. As Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist in charge of the United Nations' Millennium Development Project, put it so well, the notion that there is a flood of American aid going to Africa "is one of our great national myths."

The United States currently gives just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing the United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Bush announced Tuesday is not even 0.007 percent. What is 0.7 percent of the American economy? About $80 billion. That is about the amount the Senate just approved for additional military spending, mostly in Iraq. It's not remotely close to the $140 billion corporate tax cut last year.

(more at link above)

*(>0.02%) Is the amount of "Real Aid" the U.S. gave last year, as calculated by the NOG ActionAid, USA. Here's a link to this topic here and their web site.
<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=116x10240>

<http://www.actionaidusa.org/realaid.php>