Hypocritical compassion
February 8th, 2003
Interviewed recently on his views on the impending US war on Iraq, Frank T. Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, had occasion to observe that “[Americans] are loathed, and I think the world has every right to loathe us.”
“[The people of other countries] see us as greedy, self-interested and almost totally unconcerned about poverty, disease and suffering,” Griswold continued.
The US is also disliked for its “reprehensible rhetoric,” said Griswold in reference to recent US saber-rattling over Iraq, as well as its indifference to world opinion. Griswold later said that Americans are a generous people, “but [US] national policies have to be grounded in that generous spirit.”
Former US President George H.W. Bush, George W’s father and himself a member of the Episcopal Church, described Griswold’s views as “highly offensive.” To counter his observation, the senior Bush said that the US government “provides 60 percent of world food aid [and] does more for AIDS than any other country.”
Bush Sr. did not mention that US food aid has been refused in Latin America, Africa and India on suspicion that part of the stocks of corn, soya beans and other US-grown agricultural products being sent to those countries are genetically modified.
GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, have also been called Frankenfoods (after the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s famous novel), in reference to their being grown with the introduction of transspecies genes. For example, bacteria genes have been introduced into the genetic systems of plants, supposedly to make those plants resistant to certain pests. GMOs are among the results of genetic engineering (GE).
Genetic engineering is not the same as hybridization, which does not involve the transfer of genes across species. Among other problems, the consequences of consuming GMOs to people’s health have not been established, genetic engineering being relatively new. But there is increasing evidence that GMOs are destructive to the environment and could devastate entire ecosystems.
The United States is the biggest grower of GMOs in the world. But consumer resistance in many countries has closed many US markets for such produce. For example, European countries have refused to purchase genetically engineered, US-grown soy beans for fear that they may have unforeseen but devastating impacts on health and the environment.
US food aid has thus been a way out for the US government to dump GMOs, which would otherwise be unsellable, in other countries. Unlike food aid from Euro- pean countries, US food aid comes in actual commodities, not funds with which to purchase food. The food aid the US sends is usually a mix of non-GMOs and GMOs. In effect the US government is subsidizing US farmers by buying unsellable GMOs from them and then dumping these in poor countries.
US food aid, like its other forms of aid, is also tied to US foreign policy and is given as a reward for a country’s supporting such policies, or as a punishment by withholding it.
There is increasing awareness in many countries that the US profits from its food aid in both material as well as political terms, thus the resistance to accepting US food aid. India recently refused US food aid on the grounds that it was laced with GMOs, and implied that the US was providing the aid in furtherance of political aims since India did not have a food shortfall. NGOs also fear that GMOs, once introduced into the food chains of their countries via seeds sent as food aid, can destroy indigenous varieties and wreak other harm on the environment.
What about assistance for AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome—the dreaded disease devastating many poor countries, especially those in Africa) research and care, as well as other forms of aid from the United States?
From another former US President, Jimmy Carter, comes this assessment: “[The US is] the stingiest nation of all” as far as aid to other countries is concerned.
The statistics support Carter’s view. In 1992 the world’s richest countries including the United States agreed to provide 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) for Official Development Aid (ODA).
Every country that made that pledge has so far failed to meet the target. But US ODA in relation to GDP is conspicuously far below the 0.7-percent target. At about 0.08 percent of GDP, it is the lowest among 22 donor nations.
The US also “has the worst record [among big donor countries] of spending its aid budget on itself,” Julian Borger and Charlotte Denny of Britain’s Guardian newspaper pointed out in March, 2002.
“Seventy percent of [US] aid is spent on US goods and services. And more than half is spent on middle-income countries in the Middle East.” The World Bank report of 2000 earlier said the same thing: “71.6 percent of [US] bilateral aid commitments were tied [in 2000] to the purchase of goods and services from the US.”
As low as US aid levels are in relation to its GDP, two-thirds of it, the World Bank quotes a US senator, “goes to only two countries: Israel and Egypt. Much of the remaining third is used to promote US exports or to fight a war against drugs that could only be won by tackling drug abuse in the United States.”
Aid to Israel is mostly in the form of military aid, which incidentally the Bush government is increasing further for 2003. US aid amounts to about $500 dollars per Israeli citizen. Yet Israel is not poor, but a middle-income country where GDP per capita is about $18,000. Obviously Israel’s role as the US policeman in the Middle East is the primary reason why it receives such massive amounts of aid.
US aid is also used as a lever to influence countries to support it. During the Gulf War in 1991 many members of the “coalition” formed by the US were promised various forms of aid including vast amounts of money. It is no secret that among the reasons certain UN Security Council members agreed to the US-sponsored November 2002 resolution threatening military action against Iraq were the promises of aid and other forms of support from the US—a fact which makes likely a UN declaration that Iraq has violated that resolution.
The Philippines need not go far for a sample of the US’s use of aid as a bludgeon to force countries into agreeing with its policies. Although it promised the Arroyo government $30 million in military assistance last year, for example, the release of that amount is premised on the Philippines’ either refusing to sign the international agreement establishing the UN International Criminal Court, or its signing a bilateral agreement with the US exempting US personnel in the Philippines from suit before the ICC for whatever offenses they may commit on Philippine soil.
US ODA is thus an instrument to further US interests, whether in the form of actual material gain as in the case of the subsidies for the unsellable GMOs grown by US farmers (who were themselves duped into planting their farms to GMOs on the false promise that GMOs would mean larger harvests and better crops), or in the form of achieving certain political aims, while at the same time assuring that 84 cents out of every dollar it donates (according to former Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide) returns to it in the form of purchases of US goods and services.
In the current world order of poor and rich nations, the donor is the real beneficiary of its donations. While this is often as true of other countries as the US, the United States claims to be the leading aid giver in the world, which it is in dollar terms, but not in relation to its GDP. Its spokesmen also imply that US aid is given without any conditions. Almost everyone who has looked into the amounts and conditions of US aid, however, will disagree. The US’s own New York Times has thus described US “compassion” as “well meant” “but also hypocritical.”
Unlike such demonstrations of arrogance and indifference to world opinion as the jingoist saber-rattling of George W. Bush have been, the US use of aid to further its material and strategic interests has not been as obvious. But as more and more people try to deal with the issues of poverty and underdevelopment that plagues them, they will make the connection between their poverty and dependence and the US role in it, including its aid policy.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, February 4, 2003)