U.N. Officials Grapple With How To Help Poorer Nations
BY BENNY AVNI - Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 28, 2005

UNITED NATIONS - The continental divide over how to help poorer nations was highly visible yesterday at a Turtle Bay summit of finance ministers and international aid officials, where ideas such as imposing what wary Americans see as a tariff on airline travelers were gaining steam.
Speaker after speaker at yester day's General Assembly meeting talked about increasing the funding wealthy nations dedicate to foreign aid. America, in turn, insisted that poorer nations must do their part by reforming their governments.
The meeting took place a week before a summit of the leaders of the eight wealthiest nations at Gleneagles, Scotland, where issues such as debt relief and foreign aid are expected to dominate the agenda.
Never, perhaps, have a few weeks mattered so much for the world's poor as the next few, Secretary-General Annan said.
The French ambassador to the United Nations, Jean-Marc de La Sabliere, told The New York Sun that he was confident that a proposal whereby airline ticket buyers could contribute funds to foreign aid would garner cohesive E.U. support at next week's G-8 summit.
It is not a tax, Mr. de La Sabliere insisted, explaining that travelers could decide whether or not to participate in the program.
The most enthusiastic proponent of the airline ticket charge, the French finance minister, Thierry Breton, canceled a scheduled press conference yesterday since, while at Turtle Bay, his Paris office was raided by police as part of an investigation into a corruption scandal involving a company called Rhodia. Mr. Breton sat on the firm's board from 1999 to 2002.
Despite Mr. de La Sabliere's prediction that Europe would unite around the idea, Britain has yet to endorse it. The Bush administration, which considers the additional fee a tax, opposes it vehemently.
On global taxes, the American position has not changed, the director of the State Department's Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios, told the Sun. It is a complete nonstarter.
While the French believe that a fast-growing airline industry could support foreign aid, the world's largest lobby group for businesses, the American Chamber of Commerce, recently said the French idea would have a disastrous effect. It could contribute to [the airline industry's] decline and threaten the well-being of the entire economy, the group's president, Thomas Donohue, said in a statement.
Since 2002, when world powers vowed in Monterrey, Mexico to halve world poverty by 2015, advocates such as a U.N. adviser and Columbia University professor, Jeffrey Sachs, and such pop stars as Bono have lobbied America and other wealthy nations to increase foreign aid to 0.7% of their national GDP.
Mr. Natsios highlighted the other side of the Monterrey discussions in his speech yesterday. He said foreign aid ought not be reduced to a check writing exercise and that it should be tied to good democratic governance. He also told reporters that while the Bush administration has overseen the largest increase in America's contributions to foreign aid since the Truman administration and its Marshall Plan, Europeans have decreased their foreign aid contributions in recent years.