Earmarking and Accountability: ‘A New Plan for Foreign Aid’

The editorial calls attention to the oxymoron “U.S. foreign aid.” Within the past decade as much as 70 cents of every U.S. aid dollar came back to us as payment for purchase of our military weapons. Is that what’s intended as aid? Not if you read the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961: “Congress . . . renews its commitment to assist people in developing countries to eliminate hunger, poverty, illness and ignorance.”

Whether we retain this bill or repeal it for the new International Economic Cooperation Act, one thing is clear. We need to provide real aid for real people by funding small-scale, long-term projects that reach the poorest of the poor. Poverty produces high population growth rates, escalating debt, unstable governments, destruction of the environment, and miserable lives for all concerned. Poverty “somewhere else” halfway around the world ultimately affects you and me.

As well as a clearer “focus,” needed, too, in our foreign aid policy are pertinent indicators, like child mortality rate and female literacy rate, that will help us gauge year by year whether we’re making progress or not. The Global Poverty Reduction Act, pending in Congress, addresses both of these issues.

We need to stay tuned in to Washington, D.C., and we need to let our legislators know this is a priority. The quality of everyone’s future depends on it.

ANDREA BURRELL

Huntington Beach