U.S. foreign aid success touted

DES MOINES - How the U.S. should address conflicts in the Middle East has become a dominant issue in the presidential campaign.

Michael Gerson hopes another foreign policy issue - U.S. foreign aid - also grabs a piece of the debate and continues to get support from the next president.

Gerson, a Washington Post columnist and fellow for ONE, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and disease around the globe, said this week during a visit to Iowa that the organization is building up in Iowa to inform presidential candidates and encourage them to continue foreign-aid programs should they be elected.

'Every four years, ONE has had an effort in the early primary states and early caucus states to try to encourage Republicans and Democrats to support the accounts in our government that are used for foreign aid and diplomacy,” said Gerson, who served as a speech writer and policy aide for President George W. Bush.

ONE was co-founded in 2004 by Bono, the lead singer of the rock band U2.

According to the group:

' The number of people worldwide living in extreme poverty - on less than $1.90 per day - dropped 66 percent between 1990 and 2012.

' Some 15 million people now have access to AIDS and HIV medication, up from 700,000 in 2000.

' Malaria death rates have decreased by 65 percent.

' Global child deaths have fallen 54 percent, thanks to the proliferation of vaccines, bed nets and nutritional programs.

U.S. foreign aid funding helps sustain the programs that make those achievements possible, said Gerson, who has made trips to Africa to see firsthand the health and poverty crises there.

'It was truly transformational, what I saw on the ground,” Gerson said. 'In 2003, when I first went to Africa, I walked into South Africa shanty towns where you almost exclusively saw grandparents and their grandchildren because an entire intervening generation was gone. There was a point at which Zambia, which was one of our focus countries, for every teacher that was graduating from its teacher schools, two teachers were dying. It was just these impossible situations, hopeless.”

Gerson said advocating for U.S. foreign aid is crucial because campaigns often use it as a sacrificial lamb in calls to cut government spending, even though spending on foreign aid makes up less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

'We get a lot of bang for the buck in this case,” Gerson said. 'We don't have a budget problem because we spend too much on bed nets for children in Africa.”

Gerson said another debate that potentially could affect foreign aid is the extent to which the U.S. should be involved militarily in other regions.

Gerson said he hopes the United States - and its next president - continue to support foreign-aid programs to sustain the successes and to foster healthy relationships with those regions.

'I think this has been just a tremendous success story in increasing goodwill in an increasingly important region,” Gerson said. 'People have a different attitude toward you as a country if you have saved their children from death. And we've done a lot of that in the last 10 to 15 years.”