Mr. President,

I recently heard your proposal to increase the minimum aid you give poor countries. I assure you that I was, once again, disappointed. Mr. President, the idea is not to increase the aid, but rather to cancel the debt to allow these countries to breathe.

You surely will tell me that it is not your fault if African countries are poor. But you can still support their development, even if only out of historic and humanitarian duty. Mr. President, the same way you fight terrorism, you also have to fight poverty. Yet, I see that your focus, your energy, is guided towards new conquests for your “empire.” We live in two worlds: a world where some live in comfort and abundance and others live with less than one dollar a day. You don’t stop repeating in your speeches that you are a compassionate man. Believe me, Mr. President, the poor did not choose to be poor. It is therefore imperative to include the poor of the world in a circle of development.

Perhaps it would be better to change your strategy. Use the geniuses around you to come up with new ideas, because decades of massive aid for development have failed to stimulate growth in the most impoverished countries. When you speak of economic development, what really counts is more children benefiting from better education, more people having access to a health system and drinking water, or workers finding jobs to assure a better future for their family.

Sir, when I see the figures of your expenditures for Iraq, I am again astonished. These amounts would serve to develop agriculture and biotechnology, for example. These two fields have enormous potential to improve the yield of the crops in underdeveloped countries.

Concerning the fight against poverty, America historically has always been behind. The strategy of your administration in this matter is a true disaster. The other evening, I was listening on CSPAN to the recent senate hearings concerning aid to poor African countries. The measures considered by America to combat malaria, one of the diseases that kills the most people in Africa, for example, looked more like an advertisement than a fight against the disease. Due to your lack of action, the United States will be, allow me to say, responsible for the loss of millions of lives and will aggravate world instability.

When cancellation of the African debt by the other G8 countries is mentioned, you propose once again a little additional emergency food aid. Another disappointment! Mr. President, as the Bapopos, the fishing people of Benin, say, “Teach your neighbor to fish, you will help him for life.”