Word: aid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Outside big cities, many aid workers face constant danger. Guerrillas ambushed a 50-truck relief convoy late last year in southern Sudan, killing ten drivers. In a previous attack, rebels handcuffed truck drivers to their steering wheels and executed them by tossing hand grenades into the cabs. In Mozambique, where resistance fighters are at war with the Marxist government, few foreigners dare venture far from the capital of Maputo or other relatively secure areas. Some who do so never return. When relief workers reached the Indian Ocean port of Vilanculos last year, they found that a five-member East German...
Even without the threat posed by guerrillas, not all Third World aid reaches its destination. Some is skimmed off by corrupt middlemen, some may wind up in the pockets of a country's officials, and still more may spoil or be stolen. "I wouldn't claim that 100% gets exactly where it should," concedes Jean-Pierre Hocke, United Nations high commissioner for refugees. Hocke estimates that up to 10% of relief contributions for refugees never gets to them. Says Millicent Fenwick, the American envoy to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome: "You have to understand that...
American foreign-aid efforts have shifted dramatically during the past decade. Washington, once a key source of development assistance, now stresses military rather than humanitarian help. The largest U.S.-aid recipients last year were Israel ($3 billion) and Egypt ($2 billion), and more than half of that assistance was in the form of weapons and other defense hardware. Not a single African country south of the Sahara was among the top-ten American-aid recipients. "We're basically out of the development business," says Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. "In the long run, that is unwise...
Winning votes for any type of foreign assistance is one of the toughest jobs in Washington. With domestic social programs tightly curtailed by Gramm-Rudman spending limits, few Congressmen can politically afford to support more overseas aid. Thus while the U.S. remains the world's largest single source of foreign giving, its contribution is the smallest among major industrial nations when measured as a fraction of gross national product...
...Foreign-aid supporters argue that the West has little choice but to continue sharing its largesse with less fortunate nations. Without assistance, "this would be a less caring and compassionate world," says Representative Stephen Solarz of New York, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "These agencies embody the consciences of the countries that they come from." Yet at a time when government budgets everywhere are strained, political leaders demand more than ever that foreign aid be wisely given and effectively used...