As world leaders gather for the international summit in Scotland next week, our war prez is suddenly getting too much good p.r. from friendly headlines here and here in The New York Times, as well as a very friendly editorial this morning for his newly announced anti-malaria initiative for Africa ($1.2 billion in aid over five years).
Not to mention the worldwide attention tied to the celebrity-studded Live 8 concerts organized by Bob Geldof, left, and taking place this weekend — in London, Philadelphia, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, Johannesburg, etc. — or the Bono juggernaut, which puts a rosier glow on the regime’s Africa programs than anyone except the regime itself.
But not everybody is taken in by the regime’s seeming generosity. The Washington Post for one. Have a look at its story this morning about the inflated claims for the anti-HIV/AIDS program in Africa. Have a look at this editorial about his anti-malaria initiative. The editorial essentially reiterates the gist of what Jeffrey Sachs said on June 14 at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the strongest, most voluble proponent of development aid for the third world, especially in Africa.
Pictures can do more than words to make the case at times — have a look at Finbarr O’reilly’s Reuters photo of a starving child in southern Nigeria, below — but now that the council has finally posted the transcript, here are some of Sachs’s most telling points:
$40 BILLION IN DEBT RELIEF
The trick is to separate the headlines from the ground reality. … [A]rithmetic is the most important thing in this, the arithmetic of life and death, and the per capita … flows that are involved. So here’s a headline: Forgiving $40 billion of debt — what does it mean?
[T]he actual cash flow involved, is about $1.5 billion a year over these 18 countries. They will not get $1.5 billion of net relief even from this because the way that it’s going to work is that these countries will stop paying, and the U.S. and other creditors will pay the cash flow to the World Bank and to the other asset holders to keep those balance sheets whole. But the U.S. has said that when it pays the Bank, in lieu of these countries paying the Bank, it’s going to take it out of existing aid budgets.
So what’s the real issue here? Is there any real resource gained from this at all? Hard to know, but it’s small, because even if it were $1.5 billion, all of the estimates are for Africa that we need about $25 billion a year; after all, there are 750 million people in Africa exposed to some of the worst disease pandemics in the world. So this would be tiny even if it were resources actually flowing, and it’s not clear it is net resources. It’s a very small part of the overall necessary aid.
THE MYTH ABOUT U.S. AID
The biggest myth in our country is how much aid we give and how much has gone down the drain. This is what I confront every day, many times a day from hate mail, to questions, and so forth. Let me just run through, if I could, what we actually do for Africa.
The U.S. aid to Africa is $3 billion this year. That $3 billion is roughly divided into three parts: The first is emergency food shipments. Of the billion or so in emergency food shipments, half of that, roughly $500 million, is just transport costs. So the commodities are maybe half a billion dollars. That’s not development assistance, that’s emergency relief. The second billion is the AIDS program, now standing at about $1 billion. That, on the whole, is a good thing. I would call it a real program. It’s providing commodities; it’s providing relief. It started late and it’s too small, but it’s there. The third billion is everything else we do for child survival, maternal survival, family planning, roads, power, water and sanitation, malaria. … Most of that, approaching 80 percent, is actually American consultant salaries. There’s almost no delivery of commodities, for example. There’s essentially zero financing to help a country build a school or build a clinic or dig a well. [Italics added.]
When you get down to it, the actual financing we provide to help Africans invest in their future is well under $1 per African per year. Then, the politicians say — as George Bush did yesterday — we give so much money and it’s misused; we won’t let that happen. The fact is we put in almost no funding, and it accomplishes almost nothing. And then we bemoan the waste. I don’t know how to break through that misunderstanding. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for many years, but it’s very, very powerful in this country.
THE MILLENIUM CHALLENGE
[T]hat’s another interesting thing. The Millennium Challenge Corporation was announced on March 14, 2002. I remember the speech. They also asked Bono to sit next to the president as he spoke at the Inter-American Development Bank to announce this. Then we went to Monterrey, Mexico, where there was the International Conference on Financing for Development. George Bush came. The U.N. ambassador at the time, John Negroponte, came over and whispered in my ear, “Well, you’re getting what you asked for,” which is always a dangerous thing to hear! [Laughter] And they announced $10 billion in the next three years of well-targeted aid to well-governed countries.
Let me tell you now, we’re three years, four months since that date. Not one penny has been disbursed. One program for Africa has been signed–that’s for Madagascar. It’s a four-year, $110 million program. It was signed in April. As far as I know, not a single penny has actually gone yet. The first year is supposed to be $27 million. It’s a program that, in my view, is poorly conceived anyway, but that’s–I don’t even want to quibble on that. But it is, at best, that we’ll have in the first four years $27 million going to Africa. This is what passes for our help.
BONO AND THE U.S. REGIME
Bono’s belief has been that being nice is going to be the way to bring everyone along. And everything that’s been announced has been championed. We get good headlines for the Millennium Challenge Corporation. We say it’s wonderful. The Bush administration claims it’s tripled aid to Africa, which, aside from the fact that you can multiply three times an insignificant number and still get an insignificant number, it’s also not even true in terms of the numbers.
But this is an administration that people don’t like to take on head-on. You get slammed when you do it. They work very closely with the White House, Bono and his group, because they think that that’s what’s going to bring — that’s what’s going to bring everything along. I mean, Bono’s not only well-meaning, he’s heartfelt and earnest, and incredibly hardworking, and I admire him enormously for it. But my job is to know the arithmetic, and we’re not solving the problems. We’re just talking about them.
AMERICAN OPINION
[T]here’s so much confusion that it’s very hard to break through, because — as you probably know, the actual views in America — when people are asked to estimate what we give, they overestimate by a factor of about 30. And when you look at what the president says, like he said yesterday and the day before, and when Tony Blair came–it is absolutely deep misinformation, so there’s no way to get out–no way to get out of this, in terms of public–it’s almost impossible to get out of it in terms of basic public understanding.
And the readiness of people to hear this message is low. Americans do not like to hear this, and when I said it last night on television, I got a slew of e-mail [saying], “That can’t be right, you don’t know what you’re talking about, stop picking on the president, and stop picking on us, and why should we throw money down the drain for Africans?” — and many things like that.
So this is really deep, and it’s — it is coming to the truth right now, I think. The moment of truth, I should say. When Tony Blair came and George Bush said no, this was the most decisive moment of many years of this effort, because he basically said, “We’re not joining this effort.”
MALARIA AND U.S. POLICY
Malaria will kill 3 million people this year. It’s utterly preventable. It’s 100 percent treatable. It will kill 3 million children. It’s really something to see a child dying of malaria. I’ve seen a lot of them in the last year dying of malaria. It’s the most useless, ridiculous thing in the world, because a pill in the right time would save them, and because every child that I saw dying of malaria had not had the benefit of a $7 bed net.
The United States has not seen fit to give away bed nets. It’s seen fit to advertise the sale of bed nets in what’s called social marketing. …[W]e spend all our malaria budget on advertising in Africa rather than giving away bed nets. Our total spending on malaria is $90 million a year. In other words, 25 cents per American. This is not commensurate with a disease which will kill 3 million children, nor is it right to spend the $90 million with $60 million of it being in advertising as opposed to delivery of services.
And then I’ve been in the White House — on e-mail with the White House every day in the last week in the lead-up to the summit. They’re sticking with this social marketing because that’s the only sustainable approach, they tell me. It’s got to be done through the market. The only sustainable approach. I say to them, “But isn’t it a mark on your sustainability that 3 million Africans will die this year? Is that very sustainable?” “Well, yeah; but sorry, Professor Sachs, we’re not going to get Africans dependent on our aid,” is the answer. So the fact of the matter is that public health specialists understand very well how this massive disease burden could be brought under control, but we’re not doing it.
NECESSARY INFRASTRUCTURE
It would be possible for $1 billion to lay a fiber-optic cable throughout Africa. One billion dollars is the best estimate. If we cared to do it, we could do it. Why don’t Africans do this? Because Africans don’t have enough to eat, much less to invest the surplus. The average income in sub-Saharan Africa right now is about $350 a year. But that’s not even income; that’s imputed value of food grown and eaten. It’s just non-food subsistence. So there is no surplus there.
The clinics that I go to do not have running water. They don’t have a complete surgical kit. The mothers that make it to the clinic, in breech birth or in need of a C-section, or in hemorrhage, they die there because there aren’t the facilities. These are not hard things to change. Once in a while, private efforts get together to try to do something, like Rotary International to control polio. They have a great success. Smallpox, by the way, which was successfully eradicated, as you know — the United States voted against it, the effort, in the 1960s. Said it could never happen. It turned out it was some tens of millions of dollars to actually do this, once we decided to do it. African river blindness has [been] gotten under control. [President] Jimmy Carter has been trudging through the poorest places in the world, controlling African Guinea-worm with remarkable success at a very low budget.
PAUL WOLFOWITZ, NEW PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD BANK
[W]hat I like about Paul Wolfowitz is that he understands what a real budget is, because he was dealing with a $500 billion budget [as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense]. Now he’s being asked to fix the world on a $7 billion budget, and he knows that he’s operating at the level of a failed weapons system now. [Laughter]
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