Wall Street Journal - July 6, 2005

In an interview broadcast in Britain on Monday, Mr. Bush said the U.S. would "absolutely" drop its system of farm subsidies if the European Union eliminated its $40 billion a year Common Agricultural Policy. Now, that's a radical idea. It certainly trumps the calls by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others to double official development aid to sub-Saharan Africa or to forgive more debt. Getting rid of U.S. and EU farm subsidies -- and the protectionism they entail -- would do far more to address what liberals like to call a "root cause" of poverty.

Too many African exports, particularly farm commodities, are kept out of Western markets by tariffs, import quotas and price supports for domestic producers. Open those markets and encourage better African governance and, as history has proven over and over, you'll unlock the door for poor nations to generate wealth and free themselves from dependence on handouts. But don't expect the leaders assembled in Scotland to rally behind Mr. Bush's idea; they aren't about to take on powerful domestic interests.

Instead, it's so much easier to demand that American taxpayers pony up ever more money. But as even the likes of rockers Bono and Bob Geldof have acknowledged, the U.S. has hardly been stingy. Mr. Geldof told Time magazine last month, "Actually, today I had to defend the Bush Administration in France again. They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he has actually done more than any American president for Africa. But it's empirically so."

Last year U.S. bilateral aid to Africa was $3.2 billion compared with $1.1 billion in the final year of the Clinton Administration. The Treasury Department says nearly one-quarter of every dollar in development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa last year came from the U.S. Last month Mr. Bush committed another $674 million in humanitarian aid to the region, which exceeds the entire U.S. budget for sub-Saharan aid in 1997. Amid such facts, it takes nerve for such former Clinton officials as Susan Rice to lecture Americans as ungenerous, as they've been doing for weeks now on op-ed pages.

The Administration has already led the effort to cancel the multilateral debt of the 38 "highly indebted poor countries," or HIPCs. These countries owe $40 billion to international financial institutions such as the World Bank, and the G-8 agreement promises to make the debt payments as they come due over the next 40 years.

The debt-relief agreement also restructures the way aid is distributed. As the loans are paid off, the HIPCs will not automatically get additional lending. Instead, the new money available through the World Bank's International Development Agency and the African Development Bank can be disbursed to any developing country. The deciding factor will be measurable efforts toward good governance.

We would have preferred that the debt simply be canceled and the balance sheets of the international financial institutions not be replenished at all. And we're not confident that the World Bank will adequately screen for performance without an independent evaluation system in place. But it is encouraging that at least new funds will not automatically be disbursed in proportion to previous failures.

Also on the subject of American "stinginess," U.S. efforts to do more have sometimes been stymied by the lack of generosity from other rich countries. Consider Mr. Bush's five-year, $15 billion initiative to fight AIDS in Africa. "I think he's done an incredible job, his Administration, on AIDS. And 250,000 Africans are on anti-viral drugs. They literally owe their lives to America," Bono said on NBC's "Meet the Press" a week ago Sunday.

The U.S. also contributes to a multilateral initiative called the Global Fund that fights AIDS and other diseases in the developing world. But last year Washington was obliged to withhold $88 million that Congress had appropriated for the Fund. That's because the law caps U.S. contributions at 33% of the total -- it is called the Global Fund after all -- and other countries hadn't provided their share.

Finally, let's never forget the enormous contribution that U.S. military spending at 4% of GDP makes to general peace and prosperity. This is a sacrifice in blood and money that Europe is only too happy to let Americans pick up, especially when it is spent in places like Kosovo. Notwithstanding this week's rhetoric, Americans can take pride in doing their fair share to make the world a better place.

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