Why Development Assistance?

Because U.S. aid is our best defense against threats to peace and global stability. We have seen how fanaticism and terror, disease, grinding poverty, rapid population growth, forced migration and environmental degradation create problems that spill over borders. In emerging nations, U.S. assistance can buoy a country's economy as well as resolve conflicts and promote human rights and free and fair elections. We can combat the causes of instability and antagonism and show the world that we care.

Because U.S. aid is critical to maintaining our position of world leadership. Maintaining our leadership and leverage over global issues requires sustaining our commitment to humanitarian values and backing up that commitment with resources. Since development assistance leads to business involvement, our competitiveness in rapidly expanding developing country markets is also at stake.

Because U.S. aid results in significant benefits to the American economy, including billions of dollars in export growth and tens of thousands of new jobs. The countries that received the most U.S. aid in the 1960s—Brazil, Korea, Taiwan and Turkey—are today important trading partners. Four out of five consumers live in the developing world, which will be the source of virtually all of the population-based growth in food demand in the next few decades. Export-driven U.S. agriculture is particularly dependent upon these consumers.

Because U.S. aid has a proven record of success. Each year U.S.-supported programs help save the lives of an estimated 7 million children. Life expectancy has been increased by 20 years since 1960, and we can now feed a billion more people. Smallpox has been eradicated. U.S. aid has stimulated market economies by organizing enterprises, providing financial services, donating surplus food commodities and partnering U.S. companies with those abroad. It has organized entrepreneurs and farmers into efficient and democratic cooperatives and associations, and spurred productivity by making available financial services and better management, inputs and techniques.

Assistance helps protect our health and environment. International assistance is our best defense against global threats such as air and water pollution and global climate change. It helps detect, prevent and contain the worldwide spread of new diseases that have emerged in the past 20 years—including AIDS, avian flu, dengue fever and the Ebola virus. It also plays a role in protecting the environment, including preserving the world's rapidly disappearing rain forests and genetic diversity

Because U.S. aid is the right thing to do. In a University of Maryland poll, 80 percent of Americans said that the U.S. has a moral obligation to support programs that directly benefit the world's poorest people. Seventy-five percent would be willing to pay an additional $50 per year in taxes to support a program to cut hunger in half. Only 40 percent want to cut foreign aid. Americans also believe that the U.S. gives more aid and a larger share of its GNP, than it actually does.