(Part 1)
I fervently hope that the decision of the Trump Administration to freeze international development aid is temporary. Since former President John Kennedy founded the US Agency for International Aid in the 1960s, US taxpayers have done much good for the world’s poorest of the poor. Food aid from the Agency prevented the stunting of tens of millions of children. Even today, for example, Myanmar is facing a food crisis due to natural disasters and a spiraling civil war according to a Reuters report. An estimated two million people in this poorest ASEAN country are on the brink of famine. The US has been the largest aid donor to Myanmar. Especially in Africa, USAID has been very instrumental in preventing millions of deaths that would have happened without the anti-malaria campaign funded by US money. The US has been the top donor in the global fight against malaria, mostly through the President’s Malaria Initiative, known as PMI, set up under former President George W. Bush.
It is evident that it is a very unjust generalization to refer to USAID as a “criminal organization” or to refer to its top officials as “radical lunatics.” We can only hope that these were emotional outbursts provoked by some actual or imagined cases of corruption or misallocation in the uses of some of the USAID funds. As a development economist, I have worked with numerous officials of USAID over the last 40 years. I can attest to the fact that I never got the impression that the organization was “criminal” or that the officials were “lunatic.” In fact, a large number of these officials impressed me as really working for the common good of Philippine society, much more than can be said for some of our public officials. They were sincerely working with their equivalents in our local community on implementing programs focused on improving health (as in food aid and combatting malaria); alleviating poverty (as in rural development programs); providing emergency relief amid natural disasters or conflict (especially in Mindanao); enhancing the quality of education (as in teachers’ training program); and in improving governance, especially at the local government level.
Let’s not rely on sweeping generalizations uttered by top officials of the Trump Administration. As Melissa Conley Tyler, an honorary fellow at Asia Institute in Melbourne, Australia wrote in a Philippine daily, in the year 2023, the countries that received the largest amount of aid were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Somalia. In the Indo-Pacific region, the Lowy Institute’s aid map shows that it received $249 million, while Southeast Asia received $1 billion. This total amount of aid went to fund 2,352 projects, including peacebuilding in Papua New Guinea, malaria control in Myanmar, early childhood development in Laos, and programs to improve the education, food security, and health of school-age children across the region.
To be sure, in my experiences working with programs and projects funded by USAID in the Philippines, I had to disagree with some of the approaches in some of the programs funded by the Agency. Especially in the last century when there was an obsession with birth control programs among international aid agencies, inspired by the ideology of the World Bank, I had to often disagree with some USAID officials who were aggressive in promoting family planning methods contrary to Filipino cultural and religious beliefs. I used to refer to attempt to push contraceptives and other artificial methods of birth control as “ideological colonization” — a term coined in the papal encyclicals. Especially after I participated in the writing of the Philippine Constitution which mandated that the “State shall protect the unborn from the moment of conception,” I objected to the financing by USAID of pills that were abortifacients which were obviously unconstitutional.
Other more recent forms of “ideological colonization” were those programs funded by USAID which included LGBT+ materials in the curricula of our public schools. It is obvious that the strong stand of the Trump Administration against the so-called “woke” culture (which gives prominence to the LGBT+ lifestyle) stems from President Donald Trump’s aversion towards what he considers ideologies inimical to family values and the Christian roots of American society.
In those cases of disagreements with the USAID officials about population control as a means to reduce poverty, I always respected their good but misguided intentions to help in poverty eradication. I just used my knowledge as an economist to argue that fighting poverty through controlling births would turn out counterproductive. There are many more means of helping the poor, such as rural and agricultural development, promotion of SMEs, fostering technical skills training programs (rather than obsessing with college diplomas), regional dispersal of industries, etc. As everyone knows today, especially Elon Musk, I was proven right. The very aggressive birth control programs of countries like Singapore, Thailand, and China have ended in economic disaster. They are now ageing so rapidly, among many other developed countries, that their respective economies are in danger of imploding.
I would be unjust, however, if I declare that USAID in the Philippines had officials who were “lunatics.”
They promoted numerous programs that helped reduce poverty in more positive ways, improved regional economic dispersal, turned out more competent local government officials, and improved the quality of basic education, among other very beneficial programs. I have more than a cursory knowledge of all these major contributions of USAID to Philippine society because I was a protagonist in some of the research programs needed to validate the usefulness of various projects being proposed for funding by the Agency. Let me enumerate some of them. Below is a very partial list of the most recent projects funded by the USAID:
1. Regulatory Reform Program for National Development (Respond). This project was under the Office of Economic Development and Governance (OEDG). Respond is a five-year policy and regulatory reform program which began in 2019 (which was projected to end in 2024 but was extended to 2027). It aims to improve regulatory control quality that will lead to enhanced competitiveness and, ultimately, contribute to higher levels of investment and trade, inclusive growth and self-reliance. This activity is an integral part of the USAID/Philippines Economic Growth, Democracy, and Governance with Equity (EGDGE) Project, which seeks to assist the Philippines to “strengthen their ability to become more self-reliant, improve democratic practices, and become a stable, middle-income economy by 2040.”
Within the original five-year project life of Respond (2019 to 2023), its policy advocacies resulted in the passage of key legislation that removed or lowered the barriers to trade and investment, thereby making the country more attractive to foreign direct investments (FDIs). Respond extended technical assistance to key regulatory/competition agencies (like the Anti-Red Tape Authority and the Philippine Competition Commission) to promote competition and the ease of doing business.
With the three-year extension, the scope of Respond’s policy focus likewise expanded to cover new areas like green minerals (extraction and processing to support downstream industries like e-vehicle/battery manufacture) and infrastructure development (e.g., the Public-Private Partnership Classroom Program). These new policy directions are aligned with the eight-point Agenda of the Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. Administration and the 2023-2028 Philippine Development Plan. Additionally, Respond provided for extending technical assistance to the Mindanao Development Authority (MINDA) as well as ministries of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) in preparation of development plans and roadmaps.
As a practitioner of development economics, I must attest to the fact that all these activities funded by USAID went a very long way in helping the Philippine Government address the Number One complaint of both domestic and foreign investors, i.e., the proliferation of obstacles to doing business in the Philippines. The necessary legislation and implementation rules and regulations (IRRs) would have not been possible without all the necessary research that was funded by USAID and involved the leading economists, lawyers, and other professionals needed to do research. Financial assistance from USAID made it possible for the best minds in the country to use their respective professional expertise to help the public sector improve governance.
(To be continued.)
Bernardo M. Villegas has a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, is professor emeritus at the University of Asia and the Pacific, and a visiting professor at the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. He was a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission.
bernardo.villegas@uap.asia
