…In order to close this gap in the short-term, donor countries must fulfill the UN’s appeal for humanitarian aid and link emergency aid with development assistance. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, Congress has the opportunity to make changes to the Farm Bill that would allow U.S. food assistance to reach 6 million more people with the same amount of funding.
10 years ago many were skeptical that treatment could or should be provided in the developing world and had a long list of arguments against providing treatment. They said that making treatment available would be too expensive; that patients would not be able to adhere to treatment leading to drug resistance; that the necessary infrastructure was lacking and could not be built. In short: it could not be done and would not be worth it.
In the last 10 years, every one of these arguments has been proven wrong!
But there is no room for smug self-congratulation as the struggles against disease, inequality and illiteracy are far from over, and especially as we learn the lessons of three scandalous oversights: on food security, on trade, and on support for African civil society and their drive for improved transparency and accountability.
Do you ever wonder what the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) do every day and what it means for you?
Excerpt:
Every time that financial and human resources are directed to these challenges - whether fighting smallpox (now eradicated) or polio (almost eradicated), or malaria or AIDS - lo and behold, we achieve great progress: death rates down, new infections down, quality of life improved.
