They Are The World
by John Cassidy
The New Yorker
The Talk of the Town
October 9, 2000

A couple of weeks ago, Bono, the lead singer of U2, visited Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and pressed him to approve the Clinton Administration’s budget request, made earlier this year, for four hundred and thirty-five million years to help write off debt relief in poor countries.  Bono, who these days seems to spend as much time campaigning for debt relief as he does strutting around the stage with the Edge—he also popped up in Prague last week, at the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—described how, in much of the sub-Saharan Africa, up to half of the children are malnourished and one in five dies before the age of five.  Helms, whose enthusiasm for mononymic rock stars has hitherto passed unremarked, was so overcome by Bono’s presentation that tears ran down his cheeks, and he was heard to utter, as a member of Bono’s entourage subsequently recalled, “You can have your four hundred and thirty-five million dollars.  You can have more.”

If this is true, it’s good news.  (Helms’s staff does not recall the meeting in such emotive terms.   The most a spokesman would concede was that the North Carolina senator was “touched” by Bono’s remarks.)  According to the World Bank, almost half of the six billion people who inhabit the earth live on less than two dollars a day, and more than a billion live on less than one dollar a day.  Some of this misery is caused by incompetent and rapacious governments in the developing world, but not all of it.  For more than two decades, dozens of impoverished countries have been forced to spend more money servicing loans outstanding to wealthy foreigners than on hospitals and schools.  In many cases, the governments that took out these loans no longer exist, but their successors are shackled by onerous interest payments.  Thanks, in part, to Bono and other celebrities who drew attention to the issue, last year the governments of the creditor nations finally came up with a meaningful plan to write off some debts, with the money saved going to poverty-reduction programs.  The total cost of the initiative was twenty-eight billion dollars.  The White House agreed to contribute less than five per cent, but even that was too much for Congress.  Last May, the Senate came up with seventy-five million dollars.  The House upped the figure to two hundred and twenty-vive million, and there the debt-relief issue rested through the summer.  It is now caught up in the election-year budget haggling.

This is a familiar tale.  In 1962, roughly three per cent of the federal budget was devoted to development aid.  This year, the share going to economic aid for poor countries is less than one per cent, which is just twenty-nine dollars per American.  (The typical developed country gives about seventy dollars per person.)  The entire aid budget for sub-Saharan Africa would just about pay for one new destroyer.  Speaking in Nigeria a few weeks ago, President Clinton hailed the ten million dollars the United States recently committed to that nation’s two and a half million HIV carriers and AIDS sufferers.  In response, Jeffrey Sachs, the director of Harvard’s Center for International Development, noted, “If he had stayed at home and spared the expense of the trip, he probably could have doubled the amount.”

The real weakness of the debt-reduction initiative is, arguably, its modesty.  To qualify, nations must meet complicated criteria set by the World Bank and the IMF.  So far, only ten—Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Honduras, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda—have received any relief.  The number is supposed to reach twenty by the end of the year, but even if this happens many of the recipients will remain heavily burdened.  A new study by Oxfam suggest that Zambia, for example, a country stricken by AIDS, where one in eight children is an orphan, will be spending forty per cent of its government revenues on interest payments three years into the program.  Tanzania, which entered the program this year, will still be handing foreign creditors almost a fifth of its tax intake in 2002.

Nonetheless, any debt relief is better than none, and the initiative is getting more ambitious.  Countries like Uganda are already using the money saved in interest to vaccinate children and build schools, all under the purview of outside auditors.  According to the World Bank, the plan could end up covering thirty-two countries and reducing their total debts by two-thirds.  Of course, this would have to come from the U.S. Treasury, and that is a political problem—or, perhaps, a challenge.  A Presidential candidate might even see in it an opportunity to go down in history as a many who helped to substantially alleviate world poverty, and to demonstrate to the rock throwers in Prague that America’s defense of globalization is more than a self-serving sham.  So far, neither of the major candidates has shown much interest.