BUSH, IN MONTERREY, SPEAKS OF CONDITIONAL GLOBAL AID

MONTERREY, Mexico, March 22 -- President Bush called today for a "new
compact" for global development by insisting that rich nations give foreign
aid to poor nations only if poor nations undertake a broad range of
political, legal and economic reforms.

"Pouring money into a failed status quo does little to help the poor, and
can actually delay the progress of reform," Mr. Bush told the presidents
and prime ministers of 50 nations gathered here for a conference on global
aid to the developing world. "We must accept a higher, more difficult, more
promising call."

Mr. Bush spoke on the closing day of the conference, when 171 nations
signed the "Monterrey Consensus," an accord committing them to the goals of
doubling development aid to the poor and halving world poverty by 2015.

Tonight, in a wide-ranging news conference, the president said no decision
had been made on whether to begin a new round of drug interdiction flights
over Peru. The flights, in which Peruvian fighter planes force down or
shoot down suspected drug flights, were suspended last year when a plane
carrying American missionaries was mistakenly shot down.

"We're analyzing not only what took place in the past, but the most
effective way help Peru fight narcotics," he said. Mr. Bush will travel to
Peru on Saturday.

The president also tried to lay to rest talk that Fidel Castro's abrupt
departure from the conference on Thursday was the result of pressure from
the United States.

Mr. Bush said there was "no pressure on anybody. Fidel Castro can do what
he wants to do."

In his talk today, the president reiterated a promise of a 50 percent
increase in American foreign aid over three years, and added that some
money might be available as early as this year -- a counter to complaints
from development agencies that the United States was moving too slowly in
its new foreign aid commitments.

Mr. Bush's pledge meant that the total American foreign aid budget, if
approved by Congress, would be $15 billion by 2006. The current American
foreign aid budget is $10 billion.

Although Mr. Bush's pledge of aid fell short of the goals of the
conference, the American commitment -- along with a promise of $4 billion
more per year from the European Union -- was considered the most important
developments of Monterrey, and proved, development experts said, that poor
nations could exert powerful pressure on the richest nation in the world,
particularly when the United States was asking many nations for help in the
fight against terrorism. Mr. Bush's pledge of aid, which he first announced
in a speech last week in Washington, was considered an abrupt change in
Bush administration policy.

"It's a shift in political attitude that is very important," said Jorge G.
Castaneda, Mexico's foreign minister. Mr. Bush, Mr. Castaneda added,
clearly did not want to come to Monterrey "without anything to propose,
without anything to put on the table."

Mr. Bush said that he would "jump start" his new aid program to make some
funding available to nations that meet American standards of reform within
the next year. Last week, development agencies had criticized him for
delaying the start of the aid increase until 2004.

But Congress must first approve that money, and the Bush administration
must also develop the specific standards for economic, political and legal
reform, making it unclear how much new money will actually flow from the
United States to poor nations this year. Mr. Bush has given the task of
developing those standards to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and
Secretary of the Treasury Paul H. O'Neill, who this week in Monterrey
expressed considerable skepticism about foreign aid.

"If we are going to have real economic development in the world, most of
that will come from capital coming into those countries to create jobs,"
Mr. O'Neill said. "We are not going to do it with welfare."

Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, called Mr. Bush's move to speed
up the aid an "indication by the president to do a little more, a little
earlier." Mr. Fleischer said that the White House had no specific number in
mind, but that it might be "a couple hundred million." Adding additional
aid this year would not be part of the president's proposal for a 50
percent increase, he said.

Under that proposal, the foreign aid budget would grow by $1.7 billion in
2004, by $3.3 billion in 2005 and by $5 billion in 2006. Taken together,
that would amount to a $10 billion increase in the foreign aid budget over
three years. But Mr. Bush, sounding a similar but more diplomatic call than
his treasury secretary, said that trade and foreign investment were far
more important to the economic health of a poor nation than any level of
foreign aid.

"All of us here must focus on real benefits to the poor, instead of
debating arbitrary levels of inputs from the rich," Mr. Bush said in his
speech at the Monterrey International Business Center. He added that "to be
serious about fighting poverty, we must be serious about expanding trade."

Mr. Bush, as he has before, linked development aid to the fight against
terrorism and also cast it in terms of religious and moral obligations.

"We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror," Mr. Bush
said. "We fight against poverty because opportunity is a fundamental right
to human dignity. We fight against poverty because faith requires it and
conscience demands it."