Mr. PADDOCK. They are reasonably close to stabilization, growing at 0.7 percent a year. Actually, Mr. Chairman, the countries that have done the best happen to be Communist countries. Of course, no one really knows, but China supposedly has a very aggressive population control policy today. Some Eastern European countries have come close to a negative growth rate.

Senator CASE. Eastern European countries?

Mr. PADDOCK. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, have very, very low growth rates now.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you have statistics on this, any tables on this? Mr. PADDOCK. I can get them for you.

Mr. CHAIRMAN. I think it would be interesting to have them in the record because we do not know much about it. I have heard contrary stories about it and I do not know what the facts are.

Senator CASE. And any generalized statement that you would like to add as to the causes for Eastern European countries.

The CHAIRMAN. How they did it, if you have any information to

that effect.

Mr. PADDOCK. I will be glad to supply it.

[The information referred to follows:]

POPULATION STABILIZATION IN COMMUNIST COUNTRIES

[Supplied by Mr. Paddock.]

Orthodox Communism holds that increasing population is a problem only to capitalist countries. Accordingly, the USSR (including satellites) has no program for reducing population growth. The Communists, however, do not practice what they preach. By making full-time employment for women almost obligatory, and by cutting living space to a minimum, they have discouraged large families more effectively than most other countries and have, accordingly, achieved birth rates and growth rates that are the among the lowest in the world.

Red China (by comparison the Republic of China is 2.3).

1.7

Note these above rates against those of the following:

Source: Population Reference Bureau's 1972 World Population Data Sheet.

WITNESS' INSPECTION OF PROJECTS

The CHAIRMAN. I know in your article you went to some of the projects which I understand you had heard had been successful and you personally inspected them; is that correct?

Mr. PADDOCK. That is correct.

98-358-73-19

The CHAIRMAN. Would you quickly summarize it? I am afraid we will have to go in a moment.

Mr. PADDOCK. Well first of all we asked the heads of the agencies, the Director of the Peace Corps, AID, International Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Rockefeller Foundation, etc., "what is your most effective program" in the area where growth statistics were the best. At that time that area was Mexico and Central America. Where are your most effective programs? They gave us a list of those programs to visit. We did not choose them ourselves. And then we went out and spent a year looking at those projects in the field. We worked with the people who were in charge and then we would go back afterward alone to study their impact. We found in every single case the results were dramatically different than what we had been told we would find. That did not mean they were all failures; they were all different. It means the information that is supplied back to headquarters is inaccurate, it is biased. There is no way to check on its validity. This is one of the troubles with our foreign assistance program.

LACK OF UNBIASED INFORMATION

In this country when Congress appropriates money for a program for inside the United States there are many ways you have to find out whether it is going to be spent correctly or not. You have the press; you have your constituency; people out there are going to let you know. In foreign assistance this is not the case. You arrive to visit a program in a foreign country; you get off the plane, the AID mission director greets you; you are taken out and shown the very best programs, usually programs that have just been initiated and which you have no way to know whether it will or will not succeed. All you can do is listen to the glowing expectations for the programs. There is no local press that is going to inform you. Your journalists who may bring back an adverse story are brushed aside by AID people as being unqualified observers. The qualified observers, such as U.S. professors, never seem to write an adverse report on the programs that they have been sent out to work on. You have no way really to get unbiased information on AID.

DR. HANNAH'S COMMENTS

The CHAIRMAN. I recall yesterday when I mentioned your name to Dr. Hannah he took a very dim view of your qualifications and your views. I do not know whether you are aware of that or not.

Mr. PADDOCK. Yes, sir, I am.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you have any comments to make on his comments about you?

Mr. PADDOCK. Well, as far as my qualifications are concerned, I have written on the subject extensively for, as I say, 20 years. I have been in the field myself as a technician and with our own AID program very briefly, a couple of years. A very stimulating experience, I might add. I have the added advantage of not having to study these programs under an AID contract. I am sorry that personally I do not believe in the effectiveness of AID. After we spent a year in the field researching our last book, I saw some people here on the Hill who urged that I go and talk to Dr. Hannah and tell him what I saw. This

I did and, in the very kindest way, I told him he really did not know what was going on in the field.

The CHAIRMAN. He did not agree with you, I take it.

Mr. PADDOCK. It was a very gentle conversation. He sort of nodded.

RETURN APPEARANCE OF WITNESS REQUESTED

The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Paddock, as you know, the myths that surround all Government policies tend to become sort of accepted conventional wisdom, as they say, and it is very courageous to question this program. Some of us have questioned it or voted against it sort of on intuition more than facts because it has been extremely difficult, as you say, to obtain any witness who is willing to challenge. Most of them come here as representatives of some organization or having had an experience or contract. And 99 percent of the testimony has always been in glowing terms as to the expectations and in some cases assertions, which we really have no effective way to check.

Mr. PADDOCK. I know.

The CHAIRMAN. I think that your point of view has not been fully examined. You live in Washingon, don't you?

Mr. PADDOCK. Yes, sir.

Senator CASE. In a very very nice neighborhood, two doors away from us.

If I may, Mr. Chairman, interpose to introduce Mrs. Paddockwon't you stand-who is the coauthor of these books, and their son, Paul. They are wonderful neighbors.

The CHAIRMAN. I did not know that.

They have already rung the first bell on the vote and we will have to leave. What I was going to suggest is that if we can't find the time for a return appearance before the bill is marked up, would you be agreeable to appearing afterward? Are you going to be around? Mr. PADDOCK. I have to be out of town for the next 2 weeks. The CHAIRMAN. But after that?

Mr. PADDOCK. I would with much pleasure, of course.

The CHAIRMAN. I would like to have an opportunity to examine more in depth what you know about this because you are a very unusual witness in this area. I personally became very disillusioned with it, on much the same grounds you have given here, but I have nothing to base that on really other than intuition and some other factors that have come into it. I came from an underdeveloped State. I still do, although it is not as underdeveloped as it once was. But the very fact, as you mentioned, about how you make progress-in the beginning it misled me to believe it could be done abroad, but now you have given me an experience in the meantime that has brought out the absence, as you say, of these other factors that we engage in here. I have noticed time and again when I want to get some money for a project in Arkansas we have long hearings. People come up. We wrestled with the so-called Arkansas River project for some 30 years. I expect it was 10 years of presentations and arguments and studies before it was authorized and it was another 15 years before it was finally completed. It was examined and everything done, constantly in the press and by local people. It was very long and thorough on that one project. Dozens of people used to come up here and all of them testified about various aspects of it. And I think when we have these

projects, we have no evidence really, no testimony other than the administration people.

Mr. PADDOCK. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. There is the last bell and we will have to go. I certainly hope we can find a mutually convenient time in which we can have a further appearance and more time to explore this.

Mr. PADDOCK. Thank you very much.

The CHAIRMAN. And, Mr. Reporter, I wish to put in the record an article by Mr. Paddock called "Foreign Aid Without AID" in the Washington Post and two other articles which complement that. [See p. 82.]

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much.
[Mr. Paddock's prepared statement follows]

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM C. PADDOCK

Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the committee, I welcome the opportunity to appear before you not to oppose foreign aid but to oppose the continuation of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. Although I have supported foreign aid for more than twenty years and still support its intent, my recent studies of what were described as successful development programs have led me to the conclusion that the United States should not be conducting a foreign aid program until such time as we learn how to do so effectively.

INTRODUCTION

I am an agriculturalist who has worked with or in Latin America for some twenty years (for the U.S. Government, as a professor with Iowa State University, Director of the Pan-American School of Agriculture, and Head of Latin American Affairs for the National Academy of Sciences). I am now self-employed as a consultant in tropical agricultural development, have been writing about foreign assistance since 1952, and have co-authored three books on the subject: Hungry Nations, Famine-1975, and, published last month. We Don't Know How. I appear before you representing no one but myself.

In 1968, after writing Famine-1975, I received a great deal of criticism for my apparent pessimism: I had said that famines in the developing world were inevitable, with pockets of famine appearing within this decade. The reasons for that conclusion were the growing population and its growing demand for food, and, in part, the inability of existing foreign assistance programs to cope with problems of such magnitude.

I did not like the conclusion of that book and hoped I would be proven wrong. Consequently, in the next book I co-authored, I strove to weigh the evidence on the side of foreign assistance programs. I began with a series of interviews to pinpoint the area (not an individual country) of the world in which the development statistics were the most promising. The almost universal consensus at that time was Mexico and Central America.

I next asked the heads of the Peace Corps, AID, Rockefeller Foundation, Inter-American Development Bank, and other relevant organizations for a list of programs or projects within Mexico and Central America which they considered their most effective.

We next spent a year in the field looking at those programs which, I stress, were not selected by ourselves or from press reports or field technicians, but by the program leaders themselves.

To our knowledge, ours is the first independent study made by someone who was familiar with local filed conditions, spoke the language, and was in no way indebted to any government agency, foundation, university or private business involved with foreign assistance.

We had expected the study to reinforce our support for foreign assistance, but just the opposite occurred.

THE STUDY

In the field, when we examined the projects we had been told to study, we found that they were not at all as described by the high officials back home (Peace Corps, AID, Inter-American Development Bank, and the rest).

We do not question the sincerity of the officials who recommended the projects

for us to look at, but certainly we now question the accuracy of the information sent back to them. Always it is biased in favor of the programs; the reports are always favorable. Journalists who may write a derogatory article about a project are brushed aside as "unqualified." Somehow, qualified professors never seem to write critical reports of specific projects; perhaps it is because their studies are so often made on grants from the organizations being studied— or possibly they are hoping to receive such grants in the future.

The Congressman on a fact-finding mission arrives in a foreign capital, is met by the Ambassador and the AID Mission Director, and off they go to see the mission's best project at its best appearance. It is like parents' day at school. Who exhibits the failures? Almost always the programs shown the visitor are newly initiated and have not functioned long enough to determine whether or not they will be effective.

I believe that two of our conclusions are crucial to any consideration of further AID appropriations.

First, development professionals do not know how to carry out an effective economic development program, either a big one or a small one. No one knows how-not the U.S. Government, not the Rockefeller Foundation, not the International banks and agencies, not the missionaries. I don't know how. No one knows how.

Second, we don't know that we don't know how. Those who give the money are thousands of miles removed from where it is spent. No channel is provided whereby they can get unbiased opinions about their projects in the field rather than the usual fulsome report of great success. One barrier to this is that those who exercise their procession in the field, who "work among the natives," often acquire a Messiah complex. For example, a corn breeder from Iowa who goes to Guatemala does talk of his program as saving not only Guatemala but all Central America and maybe even all the tropics. Such dedicated and honest men are biased sources of information. Yet they are usually the only sources of information available to the journalist, the Congressman, or their own officials back home. Add to this the fact that our aid programs maintain no memory banks. Both the files and the personnel are ignorant of previous programs, ignorant as to the reasons why they were started, ignorant as to what the prevailing conditions were then, ignorant as to why they failed and were abandoned. The result: we do not know that we do not know how. We have no knowledge of our ignorance.

AID ALWAYS HAS A "NEW" APPROACH

Through the years I have often sat in on foreign assistance hearings such as these, and have been impressed at your efforts to find out what AID has accomplished with past appropriations and how it will be more effective in the future. Your job is always complicated because each time AID comes here claiming to have a new twist on what is essentially the same old program.

This year, for example, the AID Administrator, John Hannah, has told Congress of the recent "launching of a major reform effort" within AID, resulting in a "new" program which "places emphasis on people first, and emphasizes the humanitarian aspects of our programs with special emphasis on the role of private groups." (May 31, 1973). The "realistic new directions" (FY 1974 program presentation to Congress, p. A-1) is phrasing indistinguishable from that used the first time President Nixon's administration presented its foreign aid case to the Congress. That year, Dr. Hannah testified, after stating that the President had "undertaken a reappraisal of the U.S. foreign assistance programs" there would consequently be a new "fresh approach" to foreign aid. Similarly when President Kennedy first proposed his foreign aid program, it too followed a reappraisal. After Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, described the new Kennedy foreign aid approach to this committee, the Chairman (Senator Fulbright) asked Mr. Rusk:

"What would you say in this legislation is original or new compared to the previous legislation in this field?"

Mr. Rusk: “. . . there is a great deal of emphasis on the responsibility in the country to be assisted in developing its own program for its own development... (i.e. self-help)

Mr. G. Mennen Williams echoed this in his testimony saying: ". . . this aid is not given helter-skelter, there is a priority of aid. the most important priority is . . . self help. we are going to help those countries that want to help themselves. . . that will develop self-help, self-sustaining economies. . .”