[align=center]Myth 10:
More U.S. Aid Will Help the Hungry[/align]
MYTH: In helping to end world hunger, our primary responsibility as U.S. citizens is to increase and improve our government's foreign aid.

OUR RESPONSE: Once we learned that hunger results from antidemocratic political and economic structures that trap people in poverty, we realized that we couldn't end hunger for other people. Genuine freedom can only be won by people for themselves.

This realization doesn't lessen our responsibility, but it does profoundly redefine its nature. Our job isn't to intervene in other countries and set things right. Our government is already intervening in countries where the majority of people are forced to go hungry. Our primary responsibility as U.S. citizens is to make certain our government's policies are not making it harder for people to end hunger for themselves.

In light of the demonstrated generosity of many Americans, most of us would probably be chagrined to learn that U.S. foreign aid is only 0.15 percent of our nation's gross national product -- that's less than half the percentage of GNP Germany provides, for example, and less than one-fifth of that provided by the Netherlands.[suP]1[/suP] Total U.S. bilateral assistance dropped greatly during the first half of the 1990s, as it has for most other wealthy nations.[suP]2[/suP] From a high of $20.2 billion in 1985, it fell to $12.3 billion by 1994 and has remained low.[suP]3[/suP]

For the world's hungry, however, the problem isn't the stinginess of our aid. When our levels of assistance last boomed, under Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s, the emphasis was hardly on eliminating hunger. In 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz stated flatly that "our foreign assistance programs are vital to the achievement of our foreign policy goals."[suP]4[/suP] But Shultz's statement shouldn't surprise us. Every country's foreign aid is a tool of foreign policy. Whether that aid benefits the hungry is determined by the motives and goals of that policy -- by how a government defines the national interest.

During the postwar decades of the Cold War, U.S. foreign assistance was largely defined by a view of the world as divided into two opposing camps. That often meant arming and propping up undemocratic and repressive governments -- in Iran, the Philippines, El Salvador, Indonesia, and many other countries -- only because they were loyal U.S. allies.

The U.S. government acted as if our vital interests were threatened by any experiment that didn't mimic the U.S. economic model -- the free market and unlimited private accumulation of productive assets. Any nation seeking to alter its economic ground rules -- Nicaragua, for example -- was immediately perceived as having "gone over to the other camp" and thus an enemy. Punishment was swift-usually including the suspension of aid and the arming of opponents of the offending government.[suP]5[/suP]

In the rather negative panorama of the Cold War, U.S. foreign assistance did nevertheless have poverty alleviation as a goal, albeit not for the best of motives. Driven by the fear that "communism" would defeat capitalism in the battle for the "hearts and minds" of poor third world populations -- by offering them the possibility of greater improvements in material well-being -- the United States followed an on-again-off-again policy of funding "basic needs."

@TA

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