by Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter
(click on title above to view full paper | 212kb
PDF file - requires Adobe
Acrobat Reader to view and print.)
"The overall objective of foreign aid is
to help to create conditions in the world under which free societies
can survive and prosper." (Foreign
Assistance Act of 1963)
"Not so very many years ago in Iran the United
States was loved and respected as no other country, and without having
given a penny of aid. Now, after more than $1 billion of loans and grants,
America is distrusted by most people, and hated by many." (Abol
Hassan Ebtehaj, President of Iranians Bank, Iran)
"Today, we want you to assist us to develop. We
need foreign capital, we need machine tools, we need machines, we need
this and we need that. You might say that we heard this before, too.
You are getting a bit tired of the story. But may I put it to you like
this, that we are pressing against you today as friends, and if we make
good I think you will in some fashion get it back, in many ways you
will get it back. If we do not make good and if, heaven forbid, we go
under Communism, then we shall still press against you but not as friends."
(Mohammad Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan)
For summing up the American foreign aid program to date
– its aspirations, its failure, and its challenge – these
three quotations outspeak a dozen monographs.
Our foreign aid program is not helping to create conditions
in the world under which free societies can survive and prosper. As
presently conceived and executed, it is creating conditions that are
just the opposite. Instead of winning converts to Western political
institutions, it is estranging the uncommitted. Instead of impeding
communism, it is preparing the way for it. Instead of furthering good
will between the peoples of the recipient country and our own, it is
sowing the seeds of dissension and hatred even among our friends.
Most sadly, our methods have proved incapable of penetrating
the vicious circles of poverty in which the poor nations are hopelessly
entrapped. Far from industrializing fast enough to support their burgeoning
populations, the "emerging nations" are in fact submerging
deeper into that primordial misery from which our foreign aid program
so grandly hoped to lift them. In most, the per capita production of
wealth is declining or at best stationary.
Read More - Download
the full paper (212k PDF)
