Senate Foreign Relations Committee Holds Hearing on Millenium Challenge Account

FDCH TRANSCRIPTS
Congressional Hearings
Mar. 4, 2003
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Holds Hearing on Millennium Challenge Account

ALEXANDER:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm all for this Millennium Account idea. And I have some thoughts about it. And I have a question about it I'd like to ask. And I hope I didn't miss this when I was somewhere else earlier, so please tell me if I did.

I like the idea of rewarding countries who are working hard to improve their incomes and expand their freedoms. And I think human nature is such that if you do it with a few people and you have broad flexibility in how you go about it, that you might learn something and you actually might succeed in doing it.

I also think it's much easier for American taxpayers to understand. Foreign aid has always been said to have a constituent of one, the president. And so I think it's easier for taxpayers to understand that if a country is creating jobs and expanding freedoms, that that's worth rewarding.

As I look over the criteria, I think back on the economic development things I've been involved in as a governor. And it's not so different.

In other countries, they are starting with less freedoms. But when I became governor, we were 70, 80 percent of the national average income and we wanted to get up to 100. And there were a lot of things that we did.

But as I look back on it, what helped cities and our state more than anything else was first identifying something that was unique to our state, some strength that we had, much more than any kind of indicator of how much you're spending on health, how much you're spending on this or whether you have civil liberties. All those things are important and are indicators. But how does Memphis get from where it is to where it goes?

Well, it first remembers that it's on a river. And it remembers that its agriculture is important and not to be embarrassed about. And then it remembers that it has a central location, which is why Federal Express is there.

And it has the Peabody Hotel where ducks walk across, you know, every day at regular hours in the parlor. And people come to see it.

And they celebrate those strengths. And the people of east Tennessee celebrate their Appalachian culture. Nashville celebrates Music City.

So I'm wondering if, my inclination would be for you to be as flexible as possible. I would take the risk of failing. And I would take the risk that one administration might do something that another one wouldn't.

I mean, who's to say that there's not a little bit of rewarding going on today, as we look around the country and at the Security Council, with our present policy? So that's going to happen.

So let me take a specific example. Let's take Gabon in Africa. There, they set aside 12 percent of their land for national parks. That would be celebrating something that is unique and special about a country that's poor and hasn't got so many institutions that would help it expand its freedoms and grow its incomes.

Would a strategy that is based on starting with creating 12 percent of your land to national parks and letting other institutions and other improvements come from there, would that fit within the kind of criteria that you are considering for grants from the Millennium Account?

LARSON:

Yes, I think you're focusing in on the very important issue of: what do we actually do with this money once a country is eligible? We have put a lot of emphasis on these criterion indicators for getting into the program. But once a country is in the program, then it becomes exactly the sort of process you highlighted, of identifying the comparative advantage, identifying the one big push that can really take them to the next level.

And what the president has made clear is that we want to be able to be involved in any project that is a growth generator or a productivity driver. We've given some examples—agriculture, health, education, trade, small business expansion. But ...

ALEXANDER:

What about conservation?

LARSON:

But a national park—I mean, if this, you gave the example, senator, of Gabon. I mean, let's suppose that they felt that eco-tourism was real driver of economic growth. They could expect to bring lots of people in, generate jobs for their people. That would be something that one could look at.

But what the goal is is to achieve growth because growth will generate the resources if properly used to bring people along.

ALEXANDER:

I'm suggesting that even before you get to the business of creating growth, in the case of Gabon—and I'm not even sure this is true or not true, I'm just trying to get it down to specifics—that before you get to results or programs, you need a sense of confidence, a sense of spirit. I mean, a community needs to come together for some reason and say, "Hey, we've got something here. Let's work together to go forward."

And in one place, it might be oil. In another place, it might be a national park. In another place, it might be devotion to education. In another place, it might be the location of the weather. It might completely depend.

But it would be a coalescing spirit that causes the country to actually want to work together, and then you can get to all these other things. It would seem to me you wouldn't want to jump over that. It's like nurturing a child and helping to identify what the strength of that child is.

LARSON:

We put great emphasis in our description of how we imagine this program working. On the process of citizen participation, the coalescing of the society around development goals, we've made clear that we believe one of the responsibilities of a partner country would be to have that sort of process, so that any development priority wasn't the development priority only of the president or only of the finance minister, but it was the priority of the country.

So we do see this idea of citizen involvement, involvement of civil society and coalition and coalescence being very important to the idea.

ALEXANDER:

My last comment, and I wouldn't want to push the analogy too far, but I remember in the case of both Memphis and Chattanooga, when they were beginning processes 20 years ago to try to move their cities, which they have done a magnificent job of, in our initial discussions, I actually asked them to go back home and create much larger, broad-based groups of people and go through a broad-based process, all of which sounds very mushy, to try to set some goals.

And in Memphis, there were 2,000 people who did that. And in Chattanooga, there were several hundred.

And out of that actually came specific objectives, a sense of ownership. And there may be some usefulness in that metaphor.