March 14, 1967
Page 6563
FOREIGN AID: A CRISIS FOR CHURCH AND NATION
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, an old friend and former colleague of mine, Judge Frank M. Coffin, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, has written an article entitled "Foreign Aid: A Crisis for Church and Nation," which was published in the February 6, 1967, issue of Christianity and Crisis. As a former Deputy Administrator of the Agency for International Development, U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N. Development Assistance Committee of the Organization of Economic Cooperation Development, and managing director of the Development and Loan Fund, Judge Coffin has far-ranging, firsthand experiences in the field of foreign assistance.
At a time when we read little but searing criticisms of our foreign aid program, Judge Coffin's article is an eloquent affirmation of our national obligation to assist the developing nations of the world. He points out that Americans are suffering from a conscience gap in foreign aid and that too many have fallen prey to the mythology of foreign aid. To these myths Mr. Coffin provides reasoned and reasonable answers.
Mr. President, I believe that Judge Coffin's excellent article has particular relevance for Members of Congress. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE CHURCH AND THE LONG FUSE – FOREIGN AID: A CRISIS FOR CHURCH AND NATION
(By Frank M. Coffin)
"Crisis," Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us, was used by the founders of this journal in a dual sense.
In 1941 there was an external threat to Western religious, moral and political culture. There was also a moral and religious peril in our own complacency. Today there is a gathering crisis of similar, if less measurable, breadth and depth. Like that of a quarter century ago, it has its political and its spiritual dimensions ... and a long fuse.
The present crisis is the looming unreadiness of the world of the rich Northern, Western, largely white countries of Judeo-Christian tradition to give adequate, sustained assistance of the most helpful kind to the "third world" – the poor, mostly Southern and Eastern nations, whose peoples, except for Latin America, are of brown, black or yellow skin and pay homage to other religions.
On the surface, the deficiency lies in the policies and priorities of the advanced countries. More deeply viewed, the stagnation of policy and commitment points to the shrinking moral boundaries of peoples whose comforts are increasing dramatically. And at bottom, widespread complacency in the face of accelerating disparity is building up to a massive indictment of the breadth of outlook, adequacy of theology, compassion and efficacy of action of Christians and their establishments in the industrialized countries.
No area is more subject to misleading figures than the aid field. Grants, long-term loans, hard bank loans, strictly commercial export credits, surplus food, private investment for profit, and contributions to international organizations can all be loosely called "aid." Lumping together all these apples and oranges, The New York Times on July 20, 1966, headlined the annual stocktaking meeting of the "rich man's club" – the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization of Economic Cooperation Development – as follows: "Aid to the Poor Nations Soared to Record $10.98 Billion in 1965." Nothing could be more misleading.
Few readers could be expected to draw from the article the real news: that once again there was no significant increase in governmental aid; that no progress was being made in liberalizing interest rates and maturities: that the slump in new commitments in 1965 threatened to become an actual drop in the future flow of aid.
The unvarnished fact is that governmental foreign aid for development from the dozen or so rich countries to the hundred poor ones has reached a dead level – less than $6 billion a year – where it has remained stuck for the past five years. The total represents six tenths of 1 per cent of a trillion-dollar economy. This level becomes steadily less impressive as the economies of Europe, America and Japan reach new highs, as repayments of principal and interest from the poor increase, and as the terms of trade (what can be bought from the rich by the exports of the poor) remain unfavorable. Even now over half of the flow of development finance is offset by the return flow of amortization, dividend and interest payments. At the present rate the world of the poor will, in shortly more than a decade, be repaying the rich more than it receives. It is already arguable that the flow of brains has been at least as much to the rich as to the poor.
This stagnation of developmental aid has taken place at a time when the administrative capacity of the developing world, the national and regional planning of practical projects and uses for resources, together with the population and its other needs, have all increased. What could have been a brilliant, historic, developmental achievement of the last decades of this century seems to be turning into a Sargasso Sea of wrecked hopes, frustration, mutual recrimination and despair.
THE MYTHOLOGY OF FOREIGN AID
All too few Americans are aware of this global grinding to a halt. Even fewer would point an accusing finger at the United States. In this field, particularly, we subscribe uncritically and arrogantly to a mythology that has less and less resemblance to facts.
The first myth is that we are giving either just enough or too much aid. (A 1965 poll showed only 6 per cent of Americans favoring an increase.) Actually we are fast approaching an annual gross national product of $795 billion.
Each year's increase exceeds the total combined product of all but seven developing nations. We can take a special lack of pride in seeing our aid percentage of GNP decrease from 2.5 percent in the Marshall Plan era to less than three-tenths of 1 per cent today.
In absolute terms we are spending far less today on our entire overseas development programs than when we were one-third as wealthy and helping only our white Christian neighbors in Europe. Aid accounts for less than 2 per cent of the national budget. Our balance of payments ledger shows the overseas aid expenditures have been cut from nearly a billion dollars in 1961 to less than $250 million in 1965 – a small fraction of our net deficit.
In 1966, Congress, after the usual dreary debate, cut the President's "bare bones" aid request by 13 per cent to the lowest level since 1958. And this year the prospect is even more dismal, with the President's reportedly seeking even less for aid than he requested last year – and from a more hostile Congress.
Where we are heading is crystal clear. Our average yearly per capita income is $3,000. That of the 80 developing countries that are members of the World Bank is $120. Our growth is 5 per cent a year, theirs is 1 per cent. By the year 2000, our average per capita income will have risen by $1,500 and theirs by $50. The gap will have widened by a ratio of 30 to 1. In 15 years, according to Hugo Fisher of the Resources Agency of California, the U.S. will have 9.5 per cent of the total population and will be using 83 per cent of the world's natural resources. He adds that the understatement that the rest of the world will take a "dim view" of such consumption (The New York Times, March 20, 1966).
A second myth is that we are the only nation giving substantial aid. In fact the countries of Europe, Canada and Japan have already given more to the developing world than they received under the Marshall Plan. The U.S. is not first, but fifth, in the size of its aid program in relation to its income. Others give a larger proportion of outright grants, send more experts and teachers overseas and make loans on more generous terms. Indeed, as the Western world's top aid policy-makers were meeting in Washington last summer, Canada announced its new policy of making interest-free development loans, while the U.S. Senate sought to increase our interest rate for the third time in recent years.
Another myth holds that U.S. aid is poorly planned and administered. In fact, nearly two decades of aid activities (and particularly the last four years under the leadership of David E. Bell) have seen continued improvement in administration, planning, the delicate linkage between external aid and internal efforts and discipline, inspection and follow-up.
Rare indeed are the bloopers that made the headlines a decade, ago (but which immortally retread the stairs like Jacob Marley's ghost). And somehow a cadre of development experts – who are the envy of the aid ministries of Europe but prophets without honor at home – has been attracted to and stuck with this program, both in Washington and overseas.
Perhaps the myth most dangerous to our ability to assist in this historic task of development with grace and effectiveness is that we expect more "progress" in remote places and alien cultures, for our money, than we do at home. When we fight juvenile delinquency, crime, narcotics addiction, mental illness, poverty and racial discrimination, we know that success will come slowly, that failures will often outnumber successes, and that a great deal of effort and funds will thus be "wasted." Not so with foreign aid. If the countries we try to help do not respond immediately with gratitude, political support, competent planning, internal discipline and social justice, we are all too ready to abandon the effort. We are not content to do God's work. We want to play God.
OUR "CONSCIENCE GAP"
If there is a widening gap between the rich and the poor, between supply and demand, there is an equally serious "conscience gap," a gap that represents an erosion of spirit and a moral hardening of the arteries of the American people – and their cousins in Europe. It represents a missed opportunity for the modernized world. And it represents a Pilate-like abdication by the Christian Church at what is, for better or worse, a watershed in history.
So far in this two-decade-old adventure in helping other peoples, the Christian establishment can take little credit for what has been done. I exempt from this harsh observation the quiet, steady, effective work that has been done by the numerous Catholic, Protestant and Jewish service agencies, together with their corps of keen and dedicated officials, that have been active in the developing countries. But the "Church" as a center of contemporary doctrine, understanding, education and inspiration applicable to this historic demand on our breadth of view and depth of concern might just as well not have existed.
Resounding resolutions, well-drafted testimony for Congressional committees, participation in conferences and last-minute lobbying with other internationally-minded groups to stave off disaster in Congress have not been lacking. There has been cooperative fellowship but no creative leadership. There has been no sustained or effective effort by top church bodies to relate our development aid effort to Christian doctrine. Their headquarters are woefully lacking in staff equipped to collect, analyze and present facts.
The result has been that an administration or Congress can and does slash aid requests and appropriations, raise interest rates, shorten periods of repayment, attach self-defeating conditions and restrictions to aid, cut personnel and limit the number of countries assisted, without any danger of hearing from the Church or its constituency.
The President, a few dedicated officials and a small and dwindling stable of weary Congressional workhorses have had to sponsor and defend aid policy without the assistance of strong voices from the Church or an effective aid constituency. Any church pronouncement on the need for greater, more sustained or more effective assistance is likely to be such a melange of factual error or inadequacy and sweeping generality that it cannot be expected to influence the levers of power.
At the grass roots, priests, pastors and rabbis all too often exhibit either indifference or a lack of grasp that emasculates their effectiveness in helping to find the link between religious tradition and this most contemporary challenge to it. Congregations respond generously to concrete, specific opportunities but not to the overriding challenge to national commitment. They will rally generously to support a family in Chile or a mission school in the Philippines; they will listen with warm hearts to a returning church worker, government employee or Peace Corps volunteer.
But when national policy and programs of assisting other peoples are discussed, Christians are just as ill-informed, unconcerned and hostile as anyone else.
There are signs of change. As a result of Vatican II, there is burgeoning cooperation between Roman Catholics and Protestants in the aid field. The National Council of Churches (NCO) has created an Advisory Committee on Peace with the needs of developing countries as one of the concerns. And the World Council of Churches' Conference on Church and Society set forth the problem in clear, unmistakable terms.
More recently there was the action of the NCC in Miami that gave prominent recognition to the development challenge in its peace program. But the most concrete evidence of good intentions lies in the action of the United Church of Christ, whose Council for Christian Social Action opened a Washington office on Jan. 8, under the direction of Rev. L. Maynard Catchings, to promote substantially increased government and private spending on international development. The Council hopes that representatives of other denominations will soon join the staff.
THE CHURCH AS CATALYST
Notwithstanding these straws in the wind, I sense a blandness, a proclivity to phrase general propositions, an avoidance of any program smacking of action. Barbara Ward closed her eloquent call to action in the Feb. 8, 1966, issue of CHRISTIANITY AND CRISIS with the question: "What shall we do?" It seems to me that we begin by doing what we have power to do – and not by issuing ringing pronouncements. The crying need is for the soil of Christian spirit to be tilled at home and abroad. This is a humble but doable task if the Church is so minded.
The specific tasks start with the development of Christian doctrine consistent with the task ahead and the setting of its priority. The work should continue with equipping the Church with headquarters and field staff to collect, analyze and present facts and issues, while developing training programs and materials for its clerical and lay leaders. At the same time the Church should strive to be a catalyst for a truly national, broadly representative, non-governmental, continuing effort to stimulate and sustain understanding and support of this dimension of national policy. Finally, there should be a joining of forces with the Christian and Jewish communities abroad, toward the end of revitalizing the conscience of the rich.
It may well be that the task is too big. But failure is less to be feared than striving. For while this is a crisis for the times, it is also a crisis for the Church.