[gpt3]Summarize this content to 100 words:
The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is complete. The humanitarian network, established in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy, once reached people in need in nearly 180 countries. It employed more than 14,000 aid workers through 6,200 programs, which oversaw missions from feeding malnourished children to clearing unexploded ordnance left after times of war. But in one fell technocratic swoop, what has been left of USAID is this: less than a fifth of its programs, with virtually no one to operate them.
But if foreign assistance is viewed for its collective benefit — to security interests, humanitarian values, and public health — it is best to understand it, perhaps, as a collective obligation. What, among the world’s nations, it once aspired to be. More importantly, what they must see it as now. No country, or single entity, can fill the gaping void left by the $44 billion enterprise that was once USAID. But the rest of the world’s wealthy nations must work together to take its place.
In the late ’60s, world leaders were at a similar crossroads in their confidence for the effectiveness of the foreign assistance they disbursed. Wondering where 20 years of aid had got them, the president of the World Bank commissioned a group to “assess the results, clarify the errors and propose the policies that [would] work better in the future.” Lester B. Pearson, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and then prime minister of Canada, would lead it.
He went on to produce an eponymous report still referenced to this day. He proposed, among other things, that developed countries set an aid target of 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI). At a United Nations General Assembly the following year, in 1970, a resolution enshrining that target was adopted.
If that figure were met, foreign aid, which amounted to $232 billion in 2023, would almost double. Yet most wealthy nations fall short in their support. Canada, where I live, had a contribution as a share of its GNI that was just 0.38%—or 38 cents on every hundred dollars. For the U.S., the commitment was 0.24% even before the second Trump administration began. Apart from a few countries including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Luxembourg, the 0.7% target serves as a moral aspiration.
Why do I stress moral? Because the coffers of foreign aid, as evidence bears out, contract considerably when conservative ideologies rise to power. The all but exclusive purview of governments, aid is subject to a moment’s political tenor. Countries are poised to further shrink their already inadequate offerings. Case in point: the U.K. The requisite funds to increase spending on defense-related priorities are to be plucked from the foreign aid budget — making it set to fall from 0.5% to 0.3% of GNI by 2027.
Enabling this shift, in large part, is that the impacts of such decisions are felt at a distance.
They appear to us through the lens of faraway cameras, in photographs of warehouses stacked to their ceilings with white polypropylene bags filled with grain or in little black and brown hands that press tightly beside rows of pill bottles. In sterile memos, they read to us as line items in neatly organized tables, which belie the halt in funding that has the potential to spur 30,000 cases of highly fatal Ebola or Marburg virus diseases. And, in online counters, which roll over every few minutes, they tick to us another person who will succumb to their treatable tuberculosis or HIV. For many, the functions of USAID, and the 6,000 lives estimated to be lost each day from its dissolution, give the narrow view of something and someone that will have no bearing on our lives. So we try to conceptualize foreign aid as our leaders frame it to us — through its cost.
And even then, we grossly misunderstand it.
When people understand the true cost of foreign aid, many support it. A recent survey by the health policy organization KFF found that roughly nine in 10 Americans overestimated what their government spent on aid. The average guess was slightly above a quarter of the national budget, and 58% of respondents felt this contribution was “too much.” When they learned the actual figure — just 1% — however, many, predictably, did an about-face. The percentage of people who felt that foreign aid was doled out in excess dropped to 34%.
In the time to come, the imperative will fall on other countries to meet this new demand. But in doing so, we must realize, too, that foreign aid comes at an expense that is both reasonable and worthwhile. The collective obligation to foreign aid isn’t simply a financial promise — it is a moral one, above all.
Arjun Sharma is an infectious diseases physician specializing in tuberculosis at the University of Toronto.
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