FOCUS
Bigger Peace Corps not the way to end poverty, deter terrorism

By Mark Shahinian

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — President Bush has proposed doubling the size of the Peace Corps — to help, he says, "spread the good story" of American values and ideas to the Muslim world.

Expanding the Peace Corps gives Bush a carrot to use with the big stick that is the war on terrorism. But it's a paltry effort to win over hearts and minds, when what we really need to do is fill the stomachs and pocketbooks of the developing world.

Doubling the size of the $275 million, 7,000-volunteer Peace Corps wouldn't do much to alleviate the poverty and hopelessness that foster terrorism. For in reality, the Peace Corps does more to make us Americans feel good about ourselves than it does to fight that poverty. Instead, we need to change the economic policies that I often find punishing the very villagers I am trying to help.

I am posted in a Muslim village in Ivory Coast — one of about 150 Peace Corps volunteers in this West African country. My fellow volunteers and I weigh babies, set up Internet terminals and build latrines. We make friends with villagers during our two-year stay and share our experiences when we go back home.

But I, as a lone volunteer, and we as a nation have failed to help the people of my village and villages like it across Africa achieve the general prosperity that they see as the real promise of America.

Take, for example, the now-infamous farm subsidy bill signed by Bush in May. U.S. cotton growers already receive $3.4 billion in annual subsidies, and the farm bill will tack on hundreds of millions more.

Meanwhile, a typical farmer in my village earns the equivalent of $900 from the sale of his cotton — that's most of his income for the year — and he supports a family of eight with that. Any extra income would help send children to school and buy meat for the family. Instead, these farmers have to sell their cotton into a market depressed partly by overproduction in the United States.

To help the family buy food, women here walk eight miles to town carrying 60-pound sacks of charcoal on their heads. They sell the sacks for the equivalent of $2. Their children still die of diarrheal diseases not seen in the developed world for many years.

I can weigh all the babies I want, but in the end, I'm not going to make much difference if families here have to fight the U.S. Treasury and the subsidies it doles out to American farmers.

No, I don't think this continued poverty will encourage people in my village to turn to terrorism. But the poverty does create an underdog complex, by which people think their country can't develop because they just don't have what it takes.

The few villagers I have met who support Osama bin Laden say they do so because he fights for the underdog. People living in more violent cultures might well decide to take up the fight, bin Laden-style, despite having Peace Corps volunteers in their countries. Indeed, volunteers have served in Libya and Afghanistan.

As for Bush's evangelical call to "spread the good story" of American values, the president is only making clear his ignorance of how Peace Corps volunteers operate.

The fact is, people in my village are mostly sold on American values and culture. They get excited about multiparty elections, they talk about the rule of law and watch Clint Eastwood westerns. And where we don't see eye to eye — as on the local practice of polygamy — I have been told by Peace Corps administrators (and I happen to agree) that it is not my role to impose American values.

Expanding the Peace Corps is a nice gesture. But if that's the sort of carrot we're using alongside the very big stick of U.S. economic and military might, it isn't much of a meal.

Mark Shahinian, who has worked as a journalist, is a Peace Corps volunteer.