Bush spells out goals of development aid to poorer nations
US President Bush says the goal of aid to developing nations should be to help them "grow and prosper beyond the need for any aid," and that the focus should be on providing "real benefits to the poor instead of debating arbitrary levels of inputs from the rich."
In March 22 remarks to the United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, Bush said that when nations adopt reforms, each dollar of aid attracts two dollars of private investment.
"When aid is linked to good policy," the president added, "four times as many people are lifted out of poverty compared to old aid practices."
The president said that aid must be tied to political, legal and economic reforms and that by insisting on reform, "we do the work of compassion."
On that point, he said, the United States will lead by example. Bush said that he has proposed a 50-percent increase in U.S. core development assistance over the next three years, which eventually will mean a $5 billion ($5,000 million) annual increase over current levels. These new funds will go into what he called a new Millennium Challenge Account devoted to projects in nations "that govern justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom."
The president declared that "we will promote development from the bottom up, helping citizens find the tools and training and technologies to seize the opportunities of the global economy."
Bush said that more of the developed world's aid should be in the form of grants, rather than loans "that can never be repaid." The president said that the aid should go for improving health care, such as expanding "our efforts to fight AIDS, which threatens to undermine whole societies."
The work of development, the president said, is much broader than development aid. The vast majority of financing for development comes not from aid but from trade and domestic capital and foreign investment, Bush asserted. He noted that developing countries receive about $50 billion ($50,000 million) every year in aid. This compares to foreign investment of almost $200 billion ($200,000 million) and annual earnings from exports of $2.4 trillion.
"So to be serious about fighting poverty, we must be serious about expanding trade," Bush said. The president pointed out that trade has helped nations as diverse as South Korea, Chile and China to replace "despair with opportunity for millions of their citizens."
On the issue of terrorism, Bush said that "history has called us to a titanic struggle whose stakes could not be higher, because we're fighting for freedom itself." The United States, he said, is leading the way in pursuit of "great and worthy goals to make the world safer, and as we do, to make it better."