Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring to the attention of the Congress and to the American people the plight of the western hemisphere's second oldest republic, Haiti. The Haitian people are being negatively affected by market forces out of…
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring to the attention of the Congress and to the American people the plight of the western hemisphere's second oldest republic, Haiti. The Haitian people are being negatively affected by market forces out of their control that have driven food prices up drastically. Haiti, where about 4 out of 5 people live at or below poverty, is an island nation that consists of approximately 8.7 million people. To put this in perspective, imagine the City of New York; now imagine that same city with 80 percent of its citizens in poverty.
The American people and Congress have already assisted Haiti with the HOPE and HOPE II (Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement) Acts. HOPE was the tip of the iceberg. It provided jobs to allow Haitians to overcome poverty. HOPE II will create even more gainful employment and more sustainable jobs for Haitians and create a self-sustaining infrastructure. These acts will provide jobs needed to help more Haitian citizens emerge from poverty and gain employment which will lead to a more prosperous Haiti.
However, there is much more work to be done, Mr. Speaker. Right now the World Food Programme is in need of $755 million to meet immediate demands and USAID also needs an additional $240 million. Increases in these programs will ensure that school food programs in the developing world are not eliminated due to current food price inflation. The food price escalation is also affecting the region as a whole.
Due to escalating market prices, in rural El Salvador, with the same amount of money today, people can purchase 50 percent less food than they did 18 months ago. This means that, in principle, their nutritional intake, on an already poor diet, is being cut by half.
In Nicaragua the price of tortillas went up 54 percent between January 2007 and January 2008.
We cannot let our neighbors suffer due to circumstances out of their control. We have taken small steps but now the government of the United States must be an active agent in the development of the third world. We must follow the lead of our philanthropic and non-profit sectors.
Too often those in government see aid to developing nations as a waste of money, throwing taxpayers' dollars down a well. India is a great example of the benefits of foreign aid. In the 1960s American dollars funded fertilizer subsidies and high-yield seed varieties led India out of poverty and famine into self-subsistence. India is now entering the developing world, so much so that their demand for processed foods is now decreasing the supply of food aid available to countries such as Haiti.
This can happen in Haiti if the United States focuses on delivering basic goods to the hemisphere's poorest people. By increasing vaccines, textbooks, water pipes, and medical care we will not make countries dependent, we will be giving Haitians the basic inputs they need to improve their lives. We must invest in high-yield, proven, and scalable strategies to empower the Haitian people and those suffering throughout the world.
I have submitted for the record an article from the New York Review of Books authored by Jeffrey D. Sachs.
[From the New York Review of Books, Dec. 21, 2006]
How Aid Can Work
(By Jeffrey D. Sachs)
In a very different era, President John Kennedy declared
``to those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe
struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our
best efforts to help them help themselves, for Whatever
period is required--not because the Communists may be doing
it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it
cannot save the few who are rich.''
It is difficult to imagine President Bush making a similar
pledge today, but he is far from alone in Washington. The
idea that the US should commit its best efforts to help the
world's poor is an idea shared by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett,
and Jimmy Carter, but it has been almost nowhere to be found
in our capital. American philanthropists and nonprofit groups
have stepped forward while our government has largely
disappeared from the scene.
There are various reasons for this retreat. Most
importantly, our policymakers in both parties simply have not
attached much importance to this ``soft'' stuff, although
their ``hard'' stuff is surely not working and the lack of
aid is contributing to a cascade of instability and security
threats in impoverished countries such as Somalia. We are
spending $550 billion per year on the military, against just
$4 billion for Africa. Our African aid, incredibly, is less
than three days of Pentagon spending, a mere $13 per American
per year, and the equivalent of just 3 cents per $100 of US
national income! The neglect has been bipartisan. The Clinton
administration allowed aid to Africa to languish at less than
$2 billion per year throughout the 1990s.
A second reason for the retreat is the Widespread belief
that aid is simply wasted, money down the rat hole. That has
surely been true of some aid, such as the ``reconstruction''
funding for Iraq and the cold war-era payouts to thugs such
as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. But these notorious cases
obscure the critical fact that development assistance based
on proven technologies and directed at measurable and
practical needs--
increased food production, disease control, safe water and
sanitation, schoolrooms and clinics, roads, power grids,
Internet connectivity, and the like--has a distinguished
record of success.
The successful record of well-targeted aid is grudgingly
acknowledged even by a prominent academic critic of aid,
Professor Bill Easterly. Buried in his ``Bah, Humbug'' attack
on foreign aid. The White Man's Burden, Mr. Easterly allows
on page 176 that ``foreign aid likely contributed to some
notable successes on a global scale, such as dramatic
improvement in health and education indicators in poor
countries. Life expectancy in the typical poor country has
risen from forty-eight years to sixty-eight years over the
past four decades. Forty years ago, 131 out of every 1,000
babies born in poor countries died before reaching their
first birthday. Today, 36 out of every 1,000 babies die
before their first birthday.
Two hundred pages later Mr. Easterly writes that we should
``put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people
in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the
antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the
fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the
textbooks, and the nurses. This is not making the poor
dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the
health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the
payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.
These things could indeed be done, if American officials
weren't so consistently neglectful of development issues and
with many too cynical to learn about the constructive uses of
development assistance. They would learn that just as
American subsidies of fertilizers and high-yield seed
varieties for India in the late 1960s helped create a ``Green
Revolution'' that set that vast country on a path out of
famine and on to long-term development, similar support for
high-yield seeds, fertilizer, and small-scale water
technologies for Africa could lift that continent out of its
current hunger-disease-poverty trap. They would discover that
the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations have put up $150
million in the new Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
to support the development and uptake of high-yield seed
varieties there, an effort that the US government should now
join and help carry out throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
They would also discover that the American Red Cross has
learned--and successfully demonstrated--how to mass-
distribute antimalaria bed nets to impoverished rural
populations in Africa, with such success and at such low cost
that the prospect of protecting all of Africa's children from
that mass killer is now actually within reach. Yet they'd
also learn that the Red Cross lacks the requisite funding to
provide bed nets to all who need them. They would learn that
a significant number of other crippling and killing diseases,
including African river blindness, schistosomiasis,
trauchoma, lymphatic filariasis, hookworm, ascariasis, and
trichuriasis, could be brought under control for well under
$2 per American citizen per year, and perhaps just $1 per
American citizen!
They would note, moreover, that the number of HIV-infected
Africans on donor-supported antiretroviral therapy has
climbed from zero in 2000 to 800,000 at the end of 2005, and
likely to well over one million today. They would learn that
small amounts of funding to help countries send children to
school have proved successful in a number of African
countries, so much so that the continent-wide goal of
universal attendance in primary education is utterly within
reach if financial support is provided.
As chairman of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health
of the World Health Organization (2000-2001) and director of
the UN Millennium Project (2002-2006), I have led efforts
that have canvassed the world's leading practitioners in
disease control, food production, infrastructure development,
water and sanitation, Internet connectivity, and the like, to
identify practical, proven, low-cost, and scalable strategies
for the world's poorest people such as those mentioned above.
Such life-saving and poverty-reducing measures raise the
productivity of the poor so that they can earn and ingest
their way out of extreme poverty, and these measures do so at
an amazingly low cost. To extend these proven technologies
throughout the poorest parts of Africa would require around
$75 billion per year from all donors, of which the US share
would be around $30 billion per year, or roughly 25 cents per
every $100 of US national income.
When we overlook the success that is possible, we become
our own worst enemies. We stand by as millions die each year
because they are too poor to stay alive. The inattention and
neglect of our policy leaders lull us to believe casually
that nothing more can be done. Meanwhile we spend hundreds of
billions of dollars per year on military interventions doomed
to fail, overlooking the fact that a small fraction of that
money, if it were directed at development approaches, could
save millions of lives and set entire regions on a path of
economic growth. It is no wonder that global attitudes toward
America have reached the lowest ebb in history. It is time
for a new approach.