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Posted on 12/30/2004 5:41:23 PM PST by jb6
PARIS - One-upping the United States, France nearly doubled its aid pledge for tsunami victims to $57 million Thursday and briefly claimed the role as leading donor nation, following barbs from Washington about French generosity.
AP Photo
AFP Slideshow: Asian Tsunami Disaster
But Britain quickly topped France by more than tripling its donation to $95 million and Sweden promised $75.5 million. Spain's Cabinet, meanwhile, approved a $68 million package, although about a fifth was in loans rather than outright grants.
Since Sunday's huge earthquake off Indonesia and ensuing giant waves around the Indian Ocean, the United States has announced an initial $35 million aid package. Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said Thursday that was "just a beginning."
Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's boast that France vaulted to "the head of all the contributors" appeared to be a response to comments from Andrew Natsios, chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which distributes American government aid.
In a Fox News interview this week, Natsios said France tends not to be a world leader in foreign aid and often packages its help as loans, which he suggested are inappropriate in emergencies.
"The aid program in France is not that big," he said. "They do not tend to be dominant figures in the aid. The British are, the European Union (news - web sites) is, the Japanese are, we are, the Canadians are."
At France's Foreign Ministry, spokesman Herve Ladsous shot back that French aid for the tsunami victims "is clearly donations and not loans."
Ladsous also said France gives more development aid than the United States and all other members of the Group of Eight industrial nations when measured as a proportion of a country's economic output.
"The figures speak for themselves," he said.
France allotted .41 percent of its gross national income to development aid in 2003, nearly triple the .15 percent from the United States, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The United States, which has a far bigger economy, led in dollar terms, donating $16.2 billion to France's $7.2 billion, which ranked third among the G-8 nations, OECD figures show. Japan was second.
After Sunday's disaster, in which 22 French citizens are known dead and 560 are missing, France first announced it would donate $30 million — but Raffarin said Thursday it would give an additional $27.2 million for preventing epidemics.
President Jacques Chirac, echoing calls from Germany and Italy, said France would press the Paris Club of creditor nations for a moratorium on debt repayments by countries hit by the disaster. He also called for the creation of a worldwide alert system for earthquakes and tsunami and for a European Union reconstruction fund for the affected areas.
French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, back from a tour of the destruction in Thailand and Sri Lanka, recommended that nations go beyond the relief and reconstruction coalition formed by the United States, India, Australia and Japan and laid out by President Bush (news - web sites) on Wednesday.
"Of course there needs to be a humanitarian action coalition — as President Bush just proposed," Barnier said. "But there also needs to be another international coalition against poverty, for development."
Frogs croak and the UN is a joke.
I say the French should pony up a lot more than double...after all they got millions through the OFF program.
Will french pharmacutical companies be selling drugs to the devastated?
Will french construction firms be vying for the rebuilding?
I wonder why they are pushing the anti-americanism?
follow the money.
They are the core of the facist EU, anti-Americanism is their first nature.
"How come nobody calls THEM stingy?"
Because the French contribution is now at 57 million dollars, of which 22 are immediately available ? As for the 136,000 dollars, it was a mistake by the anchorman, the initial pledge was at 1,360,000 dollars.
Not that all these figures really matters, since the cost of the Tsunami is prone to rise as fast as the death toll, and every contributing country will have to re-assess its financial pledges accordingly.
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