This week U.S. President George W. Bush meets in Monterrey, Mexico with 50 other heads of state to discuss financing for Third World development. Last week, the president announced that he would ask Congress to set aside $5 billion for a special development-aid fund. This aid will be on top of the 10 percent increase in bilateral foreign assistance the White House has asked for in its new budget and a proposed 18 percent increase in U.S. donations to the low-income loan fund at the World Bank.

The Bush plan is a callous, cynical attempt to make headlines and avoid international criticism in Monterrey. The funds the president has put on the table are a drop in the bucket compared with what's really needed. More important, Bush's gesture shortchanges the poor and it shortchanges the current war on terrorism, denying the United States and its allies a major weapon in their fight against Bush's "evil doers" and the poverty that breeds them.

To his credit, Bush has proposed more aid money than his predecessor, Bill Clinton, ever did and is doing more than any of his liberal critics ever expected. The multibillion-dollar increases in bilateral and multilateral aid are not chicken feed. They just aren't enough.

The numbers only sound big. The new $5 billion chunk of change is spread out over three years and doesn't start until fiscal year 2004. That's only $1.7 billion dollars per year, which works out to be about one-half of 1 percent of the likely growth of the U.S. economy in those years. This is hardly a big sacrifice on the part of American taxpayers. The proposed increased contributions to the World Bank are contingent on meeting controversial performance indicators and thus the funds may never materialize. And even when taken at face value, the administration's proposed combined increases in foreign aid will still give the world's poor less, as a portion of America's income, than any other industrial nation.

Most important, the president's proposal falls woefully short of the need. The World Bank estimates that foreign aid from all sources will have to increase by $50 billion a year if there is to be any hope of cutting in half the number of people who currently live on a dollar a day by 2015. Surely the U.S. can afford to contribute more than an additional two billion dollars a year toward that total, if only because it is in America's and the world's self-interest.

Per capita income has not increased in Africa since the 1960s. Is it any wonder that there is a civil war in the Congo, that there has been genocide in Rwanda and that terrorist-harboring regimes have emerged in Somalia and Sudan? Africa is a swamp that is breeding the next generation of terrorists. And the only way to drain that swamp is to reduce poverty.

Bush says that trade and foreign investment are the best way to help people help themselves. He's right. And governments in Europe and Japan agree with him. But the bulk of foreign investment flowing to developing countries goes to a handful of nations, principally China. Chad could clean up its act and still not attract or retain much investment simply because it is too small, too remote and too poor. Similarly, the 49 least-developed countries -- those nations at the center of the foreign aid debate -- exported only $19 billion in merchandise and nonoil commodities in 2000. More trade would help them, but it is no panacea because their export base is so small.

No one is going to invest or do business with a country whose people are sick and uneducated. To enable Africans, Asians and Latin Americans to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, they first have to have boots. That's the role for foreign aid. And more is needed, now.