By Emad Mekay
Inter Press ServiceMarch 12, 2002
The United States will not commit itself to an increase in development aid at next week's international conference on financing for development, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday.
"Monterrey is not going to be a pledging session," said Alan P. Larson, under secretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs. President George W. Bush is expected to attend the Mar. 18-20 United Nations meeting in Monterrey, Mexico. "There is not going to be a tally sheet at the end of the session that says what individual countries are prepared to do," Larson added.
The official said Bush would be going "for the political task of forging consensus and commitment around approaches", and to drum up support for the U.S. position on development. "My president is a president that is very results-oriented," Larson said. "He believes in making sure that initiatives are tracked," he added, "so I'm quite sure that his focus in going to Monterrey will be to see whether other leaders share our sense of commitment, share our view about what the effective strategy is."
The goal of the Monterrey Conference is to launch new international strategies for reducing poverty but the meeting has already been marred by differences between Europeans and the U.S. government over the size of aid and Bush administration proposals.
Washington, a key player in development aid, has already proposed that half of all development loans be converted to grants. It argues that previous loans by international institutions, like the World Bank, failed to improve health, education, sanitation and other services for the poor in the developing world. The United States suggested that those grants be tied to concrete results in improving education, health, water and sanitation. If developing countries fail to succeed in fighting poverty, no more money would be disbursed.
Other industrialised nations have declined to back the proposal saying it overlooks past achievements in the fight against poverty and may dent the existing international development system and institutions.
Larson said on Tuesday that a series of recent reports by the World Bank calling on rich countries, particularly the United States, to double their aid were not convincing. "Now, how much ammunition is enough to win the war on poverty? I think the honest answer is no one knows. I do not know. I do not think the World Bank knows. I've read their study. I know what they're trying to do," he said. "If you ask me as an economist what is the right answer to the question 'how much assistance is enough', my answer is we don't know."
The impression at many groups and development institutions that have called for an increase in aid is that the United States is trying to undermine their estimates and studies to deflect criticism over its position.
Larson however, said Washington had proposed an increase of up to 18 percent in the funding of the Bank's soft loans window, the International Development Association (IDA) if developing countries improved performance on infant mortality, education, health and poverty.
He declined to elaborate on how performance would be measured, saying only that it would be open for discussion. "The point is, if we're serious about eradicating poverty, then we ought to be serious about measuring what's working and what's not," Larson said. "And that means that we need to be every bit as serious about it as we would be if we were in a business and we wanted to know whether our investments in the business were paying off."
Larson said the plan carries no risk to the World Bank since IDA relies on money from developed countries rather than paybacks from poor nations.
European nations and some anti-poverty campaigners have criticised the United States for failing to increase its aid to match the United Nations benchmark of 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) while European countries like Sweden and Norway have done so. Washington's aid to poor countries has fallen progressively over the last 15 years to about 0.1 percent of the country's GDP, the lowest level of all industrialised countries.
The World Bank says that financing the United Nation millennium development goals, which include halving world poverty by 2015, could cost up to 60 billion dollars a year in additional aid for the next 15 years. This is more than double the current levels of aid.
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