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Message to the Congress Transmitting Annual Report on the Foreign Assistance Program, Fiscal Year 1965.

January 17, 1966

To the Congress of the United States:

The Annual Report on the Foreign Assistance Program of the United States for fiscal year 1965, which I here transmit, shows what Americans have done during the past twelve months to help other people help themselves.

The record of these months offers new testimony to our continuing conviction that our own peace and prosperity here at home depends on continued progress toward a better life for people everywhere.

In pursuit of that goal, we have, during this past year, placed new emphasis on the basic problem of securing more food for the world's population.

We have agreed to extend technical assistance to countries asking for help on population programs. At the same time, our overseas missions have been directed to give priority to projects for achieving better agriculture. Additional resources of our great universities have been applied to rural development efforts abroad, and we have moved to increase the nutritional value of food shipped overseas for children.

During these past twelve months we have also:

--Begun to make education a more vital part of our assistance to other nations. Today, 70 American universities are engaged in the development of 39 Asian, African and Latin American countries through this program.

--Given our full support to development of a new life for the people of Southeast Asia through a regional development program--a true and hopeful alternative to profitless aggression. We have made progress toward the establishment of an Asian Development Bank, and accelerated plans for development of the critical Mekong River Basin.

The twelve months covered by this report also reflect our progress toward making our aid programs both more realistic, and more efficient. For example:

--Foreign assistance has become a smaller factor in our balance of payments. In fiscal year 1965, more than 80 cents of every AID dollar was spent for the purchase of American goods and services. American products and skills went overseas as aid; most of the dollars which paid for them stayed in this country.

--Foreign aid has become a smaller burden on our resources. The $3.5 billion committed for military and economic assistance in fiscal year 1965 represented 3.5 percent of the Federal budget and one-half of one percent of the U.S. gross national product.

At the height of the Marshall Plan, in comparison, foreign aid accounted for more than 11 percent of the Federal budget and nearly 2 percent of our gross national product.

Perhaps the most important single change in our AID programs has been the shift from simply helping other countries stay afloat to helping them become self-supporting, so that our assistance will no longer be needed.

Three-fourths of our AID program in fiscal year 1965 was devoted to development assistance: programs of technical and capital assistance in agriculture, industry, health and education that strengthen the ability of other nations to use their own resources.

Finally, private participation in AID programs is at an all-time high. Through contracts with American universities, business firms, labor unions, cooperatives, and other private groups, AID has sharply increased the involvement of non-governmental resources in international development.

Two of every five AID-financed technicians in the field today are not Federal employees, but experts from private American institutions.

There is much in the less-developed world that causes us deep concern today: enmity between neighbor nations that threatens the hard-won gains of years of development effort; reluctance to move rapidly on needed internal reforms; political unrest that delays constructive programs to help the people; an uncertain race between food supplies and population.

We are right to be concerned for the present. But we are also right to be hopeful for the future. In this report are recorded some of the solid, human achievements on which our future hopes are based.

Whether it provides strength for threatened peoples like those in Southeast Asia, or support for the self-help of millions on the move in Latin America, in Africa, in the Near East and South Asia, our foreign assistance program remains an investment of critical and promising importance to our own national future.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

January 17, 1966

Note: The report is entitled "The Foreign Assistance Program, Annual Report to the Congress, Fiscal Year 1965" (Government Printing Office, 77 pp.)

The President's message was made public as part of a White House release summarizing the report. The release stated that two-thirds of the $3.5 billion total, the lowest foreign aid commitment since fiscal year 1961, was for economic assistance programs administered by the Agency for International Development and the balance was for military assistance administered by the Department of Defense.

The release noted that 90 percent of the economic assistance went to just 25 countries, although 77 countries had received some kind of assistance during the year. It pointed out that four countries (Vietnam, Laos, Korea, and Jordan) accounted for 80 percent of AID supporting assistance during the year, and that seven countries (Brazil, Chile, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tunisia, and Turkey) accounted for 80 percent of AID development loans. The report noted that AID programs had been brought to a close in five additional countries during the year.

The release pointed out that greater amounts of military assistance were allocated to Southeast Asia because of increased Communist pressure on South Vietnam and other countries in the area (2 Weekly Comp. Pres. Docs., p. 51).

Lyndon B. Johnson, Message to the Congress Transmitting Annual Report on the Foreign Assistance Program, Fiscal Year 1965. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238501

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