Too many Egyptians in my view have come to measure the relationship on the basis of dollar amounts of American assistance going to Egypt. Thirty years ago, when Egypt’s GDP was about 20 billion dollars and our aid was perhaps 10% of that gross domestic product that was a significant measurement of one aspect of the relationship. But today your GDP has grown by at least 5 times; your well over a hundred billion dollars in gross domestic product and our aid has shrunk in dollar terms and in percentage terms of the gross domestic product it shrunk even faster to less than 2%, a little over 1 %. But still there’s a fascination, a fixation on that figure. So I ask you, please focus on trade not aid as a measure or one of the principal measures of the success of the health of the friendship between the United States of America and Egypt.
In 2004, our bilateral trade was a little over 4 billon dollars. Not bad, but not enough. In only two years, in 2006 we got over 6 billion dollars in bilateral trade. Oriental Weavers Carpets going to the United States, Egyptian gas/oil products, Egyptian textiles going to the United States, Egyptian cotton, many other American goods and services coming this way: aircrafts, manufactured goods, food products, many other things. 6 billion compared to 4 billion it is very nearly a 50% increase in our bilateral trade in only two years
Let’s look at one other example… at the Qualified Industrial Zones, another spectacular advance in the trade between our two countries has been in that area. Most of the qualified industrial zones companies are in the area of textiles of one sort of another carpets and clothing and there are two the trade has increased spectacularly at least by 3 times in those past two years. From 2004, before the trade agreement was completed (we signed it in 2004) to 2006 in 2006 we’ve over 600 million dollars in Egyptian textiles exported to the United States, primarily textiles, under the QIZ agreement. We estimate your Ministry of Trade estimates that over 100 thousand Egyptian jobs, jobs that might have been lost, almost would have certainly been lost to China, India other low cost producers.
Economic growth is what improves lives. It’s what gives young people hope. It’s what increases jobs. Trade and investment are the engines of economic growth. Economic assistance can contribute, we can help, but only to the extent our economic assistance helps Egypt what it wants to do anyway.
We are starting in the next three years we will send 330 people from Egypt to the United States for technical and industrial scholarships to come back to Egypt and teach those skills here to elevate the level of the Egyptian workforce and be competitive on the world stage.
