THE United States gives less prosperous nations massive aid in money, manpower and technological know-how.
The policy costs Americans an average of 15 dollars (five guineas) a year. And 2,000,000 US. citizens — many of them linked with American aid — are living and working and spending abroad.
The Intertel programme on Wednesday is a portrait America Abroad.
Producer and writer Peter Hunt, who has been working on the programme for a year, says: “We chose to show American aid in action in four countries — Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Ghana.
“They are key countries in the sense that they are ex-colonies, all newly independent, all with regimes that are not democratic — in the American and British sense — and all with different attitudes towards foreign policy.
“For example, Pakistan is a military ally of the United States and it is anti-Communist. In Cambodia, there’s competition between various countries: the Russians have built them a hospital, the Chinese are putting up factories, the French have built them a port, and the Americans arc building a highway — all of which we show in the film.
“Ghana, which under Nkrumah has caused the Americans some uneasiness, is getting aid from China and Russia so the Americans have overcome their uneasiness and provided money for the Volta Dam project and sent 52 young members of the Peace Corps to teach.”
Peter Hunt visited the four countries, collected his impressions and wrote a working script. Then director Michael Ingrams went round the same circuit with the camera crew filming Hunt’s script.
Hunt summed up lus impressions: “Tremendous appreciation of what is being tried, though we feel that help is not always being given in the right way. But some countries cannot survive without American support.
“The American attitude is a mixture of idealism and self-interest, for they know that they stand a better chance of trading and living in peace with countries that are solving their economic problems.”
America Abroad gives many spectacular examples of America helping to build, to defend, to educate, to feed and to cure.
The views on U.S. aid given in the main article in these pages may he controversial, but they are those of William Clark, who is not only a respected author and journalist but also a director of the Overseas Development Institute which deals with problems of foreign aid.