U.S. Slips to 4th Place in Foreign Aid Donations

The United States, once the world’s largest donor of foreign aid to poor nations, has slipped to fourth place, behind Japan, France and Germany, an international agency reported Monday.

The news, which came from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, prompted Brian Atwood, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to condemn the congressional budget cuts that have diminished the American contribution in the last few years.

“We’re the richest nation on Earth,” Atwood told a news conference. “We should feel ashamed. We are failing to fulfill our responsibilities as a world power.”

The survey by the international organization confirmed the steady decline in U.S. government donations to the developing world, even as public opinion polls show that most Americans believe the United States is far more generous than it is.

A poll by the University of Maryland a year ago, for example, reported that Americans believed 18% of the U.S. government budget was devoted to foreign aid, a figure that those polled said should be cut to 8%. In fact, the United States devotes less than 1% of its budget to foreign aid.

Moreover, the United States spends only one-tenth of 1% of its gross national product on foreign aid, the lowest percentage among the 27 industrial nations that belong to the OECD.

“That’s not generous,” Atwood said. “We will not balance our budget if the developing world continues to produce failed states that disrupt the global economy. . . . If we continue to ignore this responsibility, the world will see increasing chaos, and our generation will be condemned for its shortsightedness.”

For more than 40 years after President Harry S. Truman announced in his 1949 inaugural address that he would offer the peoples of the developing world American technical assistance to help them “realize their aspiration for a better life,” the United States was the largest donor of foreign aid.

But it fell behind Japan in the early 1990s to second place before tumbling to fourth place in 1995, the OECD reported. In fact, Japan, a country with half the population of the United States, gave out twice as much in foreign aid last year.

Japan donated $14.5 billion in 1995; France, $8.4 billion; Germany, $7.5 billion; and the United States, $7.3 billion. They were followed by the Netherlands ($3.3 billion), Britain ($3.2 billion), Canada ($2.1 billion), Sweden ($2 billion), Denmark ($1.6 billion) and Italy ($1.5 billion), the organization said.

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It also reported that there was a general decline of 9% in worldwide aid to poor countries from 1994 to 1995, but that was far less than the 28% drop in U.S. giving. The organization attributed the decline mainly to “continued efforts by many . . . countries to reduce their budget deficits.”

But the report also said that private investments and loans to poor nations increased last year to an all-time high of $170 billion, more than twice the amount that came as governmental foreign aid. Discounting for inflation, worldwide foreign aid totaled $57.2 billion in 1995, well below the record of $63.4 billion in 1991.

Although the United Nations has set 0.7% of a country’s gross national product as the target for foreign assistance, the international organization said that only four countries surpassed that goal: Denmark with 0.97%, Sweden with 0.89%, Norway with 0.87% and the Netherlands with 0.8%.

The American mark of 0.1% was the lowest recorded for the United States since officials began keeping records in 1950. But the United States did not have a monopoly on dismal records. The total for members of the agency--0.27% of their combined gross national product--was the lowest recorded since the United Nations set its target in 1970.

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Much like Atwood, the leaders of nongovernmental organizations involved in economic development used the agency’s report to buttress their case for more foreign assistance.

“We were once the most generous country in the world,” said Julia Taft, president of InterAction, an association of more than 150 nonprofit organizations. “When you look at these latest statistics rawly, it really is stark.”

To complement the survey released Monday, InterAction issued a report by a group of nongovernmental organizations arguing the need for more foreign aid.

“Politicians lack the vision and leadership,” that report said, “to make it clear to their electorates that the eradication of poverty is in the economic and security interests of people in both rich and poor countries.”