[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 86 (Friday, May 23, 2008)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1050-E1051]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  INTERNATIONAL FOOD CRISIS AND HAITI

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                         HON. JOHN CONYERS, JR.

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, May 20, 2008

  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring to the attention of 
the Congress and to the American people the plight of the western 
hemisphere's second oldest republic, Haiti. The Haitian people are 
being negatively affected by market forces out of their control that 
have driven food prices up drastically. Haiti, where about 4 out of 5 
people live at or below poverty, is an island nation that consists of 
approximately 8.7 million people. To put this in perspective, imagine 
the City of New York; now imagine that same city with 80 percent of its 
citizens in poverty.
  The American people and Congress have already assisted Haiti with the 
HOPE and HOPE II (Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership 
Encouragement) Acts. HOPE was the tip of the iceberg. It provided jobs 
to allow Haitians to overcome poverty. HOPE II will create even more 
gainful employment and more sustainable jobs for Haitians and create a 
self-sustaining infrastructure. These acts will provide jobs needed to 
help more Haitian citizens emerge from poverty and gain employment 
which will lead to a more prosperous Haiti.
  However, there is much more work to be done, Mr. Speaker. Right now 
the World Food Programme is in need of $755 million to meet immediate 
demands and USAID also needs an additional $240 million. Increases in 
these programs will ensure that school food programs in the developing 
world are not eliminated due to current food price inflation. The food 
price escalation is also affecting the region as a whole.
  Due to escalating market prices, in rural El Salvador, with the same 
amount of money today, people can purchase 50 percent less food than 
they did 18 months ago. This means that, in principle, their 
nutritional intake, on an already poor diet, is being cut by half.
  In Nicaragua the price of tortillas went up 54 percent between 
January 2007 and January 2008.
  We cannot let our neighbors suffer due to circumstances out of their 
control. We have taken small steps but now the government of the United 
States must be an active agent in the development of the third world. 
We must follow the lead of our philanthropic and non-profit sectors.
  Too often those in government see aid to developing nations as a 
waste of money, throwing taxpayers' dollars down a well. India is a 
great example of the benefits of foreign aid. In the 1960s American 
dollars funded fertilizer subsidies and high-yield seed varieties led 
India out of poverty and famine into self-subsistence. India is now 
entering the developing world, so much so that their demand for 
processed foods is now decreasing the supply of food aid available to 
countries such as Haiti.
  This can happen in Haiti if the United States focuses on delivering 
basic goods to the hemisphere's poorest people. By increasing vaccines, 
textbooks, water pipes, and medical care we will not make countries 
dependent, we will be giving Haitians the basic inputs they need to 
improve their lives. We must invest in high-yield, proven, and scalable 
strategies to empower the Haitian people and those suffering throughout 
the world.
  I have submitted for the record an article from the New York Review 
of Books authored by Jeffrey D. Sachs.

           [From the New York Review of Books, Dec. 21, 2006]

                            How Aid Can Work

                         (By Jeffrey D. Sachs)

       In a very different era, President John Kennedy declared 
     ``to those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe 
     struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our 
     best efforts to help them help themselves, for Whatever 
     period is required--not because the Communists may be doing 
     it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. 
     If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it 
     cannot save the few who are rich.''
       It is difficult to imagine President Bush making a similar 
     pledge today, but he is far from alone in Washington. The 
     idea that the US should commit its best efforts to help the 
     world's poor is an idea shared by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, 
     and Jimmy Carter, but it has been almost nowhere to be found 
     in our capital. American philanthropists and nonprofit groups 
     have stepped forward while our government has largely 
     disappeared from the scene.
       There are various reasons for this retreat. Most 
     importantly, our policymakers in both parties simply have not 
     attached much importance to this ``soft'' stuff, although 
     their ``hard'' stuff is surely not working and the lack of 
     aid is contributing to a cascade of instability and security 
     threats in impoverished countries such as Somalia. We are 
     spending $550 billion per year on the military, against just 
     $4 billion for Africa. Our African aid, incredibly, is less 
     than three days of Pentagon spending, a mere $13 per American 
     per year, and the equivalent of just 3 cents per $100 of US 
     national income! The neglect has been bipartisan. The Clinton 
     administration allowed aid to Africa to languish at less than 
     $2 billion per year throughout the 1990s.
       A second reason for the retreat is the Widespread belief 
     that aid is simply wasted, money down the rat hole. That has 
     surely been true of some aid, such as the ``reconstruction'' 
     funding for Iraq and the cold war-era payouts to thugs such 
     as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. But these notorious cases 
     obscure the critical fact that development assistance based 
     on proven technologies and directed at measurable and 
     practical needs--

[[Page E1051]]

     increased food production, disease control, safe water and 
     sanitation, schoolrooms and clinics, roads, power grids, 
     Internet connectivity, and the like--has a distinguished 
     record of success.
       The successful record of well-targeted aid is grudgingly 
     acknowledged even by a prominent academic critic of aid, 
     Professor Bill Easterly. Buried in his ``Bah, Humbug'' attack 
     on foreign aid. The White Man's Burden, Mr. Easterly allows 
     on page 176 that ``foreign aid likely contributed to some 
     notable successes on a global scale, such as dramatic 
     improvement in health and education indicators in poor 
     countries. Life expectancy in the typical poor country has 
     risen from forty-eight years to sixty-eight years over the 
     past four decades. Forty years ago, 131 out of every 1,000 
     babies born in poor countries died before reaching their 
     first birthday. Today, 36 out of every 1,000 babies die 
     before their first birthday.
       Two hundred pages later Mr. Easterly writes that we should 
     ``put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people 
     in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the 
     antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the 
     fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the 
     textbooks, and the nurses. This is not making the poor 
     dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the 
     health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the 
     payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.
       These things could indeed be done, if American officials 
     weren't so consistently neglectful of development issues and 
     with many too cynical to learn about the constructive uses of 
     development assistance. They would learn that just as 
     American subsidies of fertilizers and high-yield seed 
     varieties for India in the late 1960s helped create a ``Green 
     Revolution'' that set that vast country on a path out of 
     famine and on to long-term development, similar support for 
     high-yield seeds, fertilizer, and small-scale water 
     technologies for Africa could lift that continent out of its 
     current hunger-disease-poverty trap. They would discover that 
     the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations have put up $150 
     million in the new Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa 
     to support the development and uptake of high-yield seed 
     varieties there, an effort that the US government should now 
     join and help carry out throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
       They would also discover that the American Red Cross has 
     learned--and successfully demonstrated--how to mass-
     distribute antimalaria bed nets to impoverished rural 
     populations in Africa, with such success and at such low cost 
     that the prospect of protecting all of Africa's children from 
     that mass killer is now actually within reach. Yet they'd 
     also learn that the Red Cross lacks the requisite funding to 
     provide bed nets to all who need them. They would learn that 
     a significant number of other crippling and killing diseases, 
     including African river blindness, schistosomiasis, 
     trauchoma, lymphatic filariasis, hookworm, ascariasis, and 
     trichuriasis, could be brought under control for well under 
     $2 per American citizen per year, and perhaps just $1 per 
     American citizen!
       They would note, moreover, that the number of HIV-infected 
     Africans on donor-supported antiretroviral therapy has 
     climbed from zero in 2000 to 800,000 at the end of 2005, and 
     likely to well over one million today. They would learn that 
     small amounts of funding to help countries send children to 
     school have proved successful in a number of African 
     countries, so much so that the continent-wide goal of 
     universal attendance in primary education is utterly within 
     reach if financial support is provided.
       As chairman of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health 
     of the World Health Organization (2000-2001) and director of 
     the UN Millennium Project (2002-2006), I have led efforts 
     that have canvassed the world's leading practitioners in 
     disease control, food production, infrastructure development, 
     water and sanitation, Internet connectivity, and the like, to 
     identify practical, proven, low-cost, and scalable strategies 
     for the world's poorest people such as those mentioned above.
       Such life-saving and poverty-reducing measures raise the 
     productivity of the poor so that they can earn and ingest 
     their way out of extreme poverty, and these measures do so at 
     an amazingly low cost. To extend these proven technologies 
     throughout the poorest parts of Africa would require around 
     $75 billion per year from all donors, of which the US share 
     would be around $30 billion per year, or roughly 25 cents per 
     every $100 of US national income.
       When we overlook the success that is possible, we become 
     our own worst enemies. We stand by as millions die each year 
     because they are too poor to stay alive. The inattention and 
     neglect of our policy leaders lull us to believe casually 
     that nothing more can be done. Meanwhile we spend hundreds of 
     billions of dollars per year on military interventions doomed 
     to fail, overlooking the fact that a small fraction of that 
     money, if it were directed at development approaches, could 
     save millions of lives and set entire regions on a path of 
     economic growth. It is no wonder that global attitudes toward 
     America have reached the lowest ebb in history. It is time 
     for a new approach.

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