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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks by J. Brian Atwood Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Lessons Without Borders Conference
Ames, Iowa
March 18, 1999
Thanks, Martha (Cashman), for that introduction. Martha is the vice-president for international development of Land O’Lakes, one of USAID’s key partners in supporting agricultural development overseas. I consider our work with Land O’Lakes an excellent example of how government and the private sector can work together – I’ll be saying more about those partnerships in a moment.
I want to express thanks to our hosts Iowa State University. President Jischke, Stan Johnson, David Acker and others have not only supported this conference, but have been strong partners in implementing international development programs. In fact, as President Jischke said this morning, that partnership dates back over 35 years, nearly to USAID's beginning. .
I also want to thank the great many organizations that have provided support to this conference. And I particularly want to acknowledge our partnership with USDA. Secretary Dan Glickman was scheduled to be here with us today. He had to change his plans because we have 100 Ministers of State from Africa in Washington today, and he had to be there to meet with them. So while we would have liked to have him here, we're pleased that he's engaged in discussing many of the same issues we're talking about here.
I understand we have participants from at least sixteen states and around twenty countries. As head of America’s foreign assistance program, it’s exciting to see the tremendous interest in global agricultural issues that is reflected here today.
This conference is part of USAID’s Lessons Without Borders program, which takes lessons we have learned abroad and brings them back to benefit us at home. Certainly that is true in agriculture, where research conducted as part of foreign assistance has done so much to benefit American farmers, and development abroad has opened up new markets for our own products.
This is not a good time for agricultural exports. Last year exports fell by $5 billion due to the Asian financial crisis, a crisis that now has affected Russia and Brazil. Still, people in some countries experienced food shortages and last year the Clinton Administration bought 5 million metric tons of surplus commodities to meet this humanitarian need.
Today, some are calling for more protection. Some are suggesting that we forget the global market place and focus on the domestic market. This could be self-defeating. This approach ignores the lessons we have learned.
For nearly forty years, USAID has worked for increased worldwide crop production, more and better agricultural research, education and training for farmers and researchers, improved national policies to support farmers, environmental action, and better infrastructure and marketing for agriculture. These efforts have been a "win-win" proposition, benefiting both our own country and our partners abroad. U.S. farmers and agribusiness need new export markets, and most of them are to be found in developing nations. At the same time, our investments in international agricultural research provide American farmers with improved crops and access to genetic resources.
The trouble is, not everyone is part of this win-win exchange. Throughout the world, many farmers are in danger of being bypassed by the new global economy.
Last year I went to Africa with the President, and last week I went with him to Central America.
On both trips, we met small farmers whose aspirations for themselves and their families are no different than those of farmers in Iowa or anywhere else in the world.
But while farmers here are struggling with slack markets and low prices, many of those we met in Africa and Central America are trying to cope with hurricanes, violent civil conflicts, severe soil erosion and deforestation, low levels of farming technology, overpopulation, a lack of education, and widespread malnutrition.
What does the new global economy hold for these farmers and their families? Will they become productive citizens in stable countries that are our trading partners, or will they become refugees at our borders -- or the victims of bloody regional conflicts? And what is the role of our government – and of us in this room – in shaping the outcome of these questions?
These are not new questions. Fifty years ago, with the Marshall Plan for Western Europe and the Point Four program for developing nations, the United States began a great experiment in foreign assistance, one that was based both on idealism and pragmatism. Simply put, President Truman and other leaders believed that by helping other nations we would also be helping ourselves.
From the first, it was clear that more productive agriculture would be basic to global progress.
In the military, they say an army travels on its stomach, and in many ways nations do too. In the mid-1960s, not long after President Kennedy started USAID, many experts were saying that international famine was inevitable, that hundreds of millions of people would soon starve and it was too late to do anything about it.
Instead, the developed nations of the world mobilized to meet this challenge. In 1968, the directors of seventeen foreign assistance programs met at the Tidewater Inn, in Maryland, to plan a coordinated response to hunger around the world. One of the greatest concerns was India, where it was predicted that 50 million people might die in famines brought on by severe monsoons.
The U.S. and other developed nations provided huge amounts of food to prevent mass starvation. Even more importantly, the international community made the long-term investments that allowed India to dramatically increase its own food production.
This became known as the Green Revolution, and it involved research and the use of new seed varieties and agricultural techniques that boosted India’s wheat production by 500 percent and to more than doubled its rice production.
Last year, the developed nations marked the 30th anniversary of the Tidewater Conference. Here are some of the changes that had taken place in the developing world during those three decades:
- Literacy is up by almost 50 percent.
- The average woman now has three, not six, children.
- Infant mortality has been cut in half.
- Five million fewer children die each year.
- Life expectance has risen by more than ten years.
- The percentage of people living in absolute poverty has been cut almost in half.
- And more than seventy nations have moved to democracy, or much closer to it.
This is a remarkable record of progress, especially at a time when we and other nations were engaged in an expensive Cold War, and some hot wars as well. Is foreign assistance by the U.S. and other developed nations responsible for all of this progress? Not all of it. But there is no doubt that foreign assistance is responsible for a substantial portion of the progress.
We have seen the world changed by a new, scientific agriculture, built on years of research by dedicated scientists, some of whom are in this room today.
The United States helped produce a new generation of scientists and extension workers in developing countries, many of them trained in the American land grant university system, or in new universities in their home countries based on the land grant model.
One of the lessons we have learned in the past forty years is that successful, sustainable development, while it begins with agriculture, must move forward on many fronts at once – including education, environmental action, public health, family planning, and the rule of law.
India’s Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen recently pointed out what he called "the remarkable fact" that in the history of the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent, democratic country with a free press.
Terrible famines have occurred under dictatorships, such as Russia in the 1930s, China in the late 1950s, and North Korea and Sudan today. And famines have occurred during absentee rule, such as Ireland and India under British rule. Yet even the poorest democracies have managed to avoid famine.
The point is not that democracies necessarily produce more food, but that elected officials are more responsive to the needs of their people than those who rule by force. That’s one reason that we’ve worked so hard in recent years to help developing nations and former Soviet states make the transition to democracy and open markets.
I hope I make the goals of development sound worthy, but if you follow American politics you know that foreign assistance has always had outspoken critics.
They denounce it as a giveaway and since its primary recipients don’t vote in this country, the critics assume they can attack the program with impunity – in political terms, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
We have, of course, an idealistic response to the critics – that a great, rich nation such as ours has a responsibility to help poorer nations help themselves – but for those who are unmoved by idealism we also have a pragmatic response. And that is that foreign aid has very tangible benefits for Americans.
With regard to agriculture, I can sum up our argument in five words: poor countries make poor markets. And developing countries make much better markets.
For example, in 1996, two former aid recipients, South Korea and Taiwan, by themselves bought more agricultural commodities from the U.S. than the cost of USAID’s entire aid program worldwide.
It is a fact that, because of the Asian economic crisis, U.S. exports to Asia dropped by more than a fifth in the past two years, and this has hurt a great many people. But the fact remains that the developing world will continue to be the key to expanding U.S. export markets.
There is no longer any doubt that the money the developed nations invest in agricultural growth in developing nations leads to expanded export opportunities.
Indeed, the International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that every dollar invested in agricultural research in developing countries eventually increases their imports of goods and services by four dollars.
For all of these reasons, the benefits of foreign assistance programs to American farmers and American agribusiness seem to me to be abundantly clear. But they are not clear to everyone, and USAID has operated with serious budget restraints in recent years.
Polls show that years of political criticism have convinced many Americans that our government spends something like 15 to 25 percent of its budget on foreign assistance. If the pollster asks how much we should spend helping other countries, people will say, "Well, maybe ten percent – that would be enough." In fact, we spent less than one half of one percent of our budget on foreign assistance, and that figure, in real dollar terms, is lower today than it has ever been.
Despite tight budgets, USAID’s funding for agricultural programs rose from $245 million in Fiscal Year 1997 to $306 million in FY 1999. We hope that trend will continue. We are determined not only to continue to respond to emergency needs, but to keep our commitment, with the other donor nations, to cut worldwide malnutrition in half in the next twenty years.
But clearly we are going to need help. We need partnerships – more partnerships -- with universities, with agribusiness, and with individual farmers. Let me give you three examples of kinds of partnerships I mean.
In Paris recently, leaders of the world’s cocoa processors and chocolate makers joined forces with agricultural research centers and the world’s donor nations to begin a worldwide sustainable cocoa initiative. We at USAID played a leadership role in this initiative, which will focus on the needs of millions of small farmers throughout the tropical world who grow the vast majority of the world’s cacao.
The initiative will include research to control the pests and diseases that afflict cacao production. In addition, USAID, the U.S. Chocolate Manufacturers Association, and individual firms, including M&M Mars, Inc., have expanded USAID programs that assist small farmers with favorable cacao purchasing arrangements, free technical assistance and training, and other programs. These have already significantly raised farmer incomes in Peru, Haiti and Indonesia.
If this program, as it expands to other countries, can help stabilize the price and supply of cacao around the world, it will be of great benefit to dairy industries in the United States and other developed nations, which import hundreds of thousands of tons of cacao each year.
The second strategic partnership I will mention involves an international crusade against the Vitamin A deficiency that each year kills and blinds hundreds of thousands of children.
Two days ago, I attended a luncheon at which First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is a strong supporter of foreign assistance, particularly of programs that help women and children, met with leaders of the food industry. About fifteen companies were represented by their CEOs or other top executives, including Land O’Lakes, Proctor & Gamble, Kellogg, Roche Vitamins, BASF, and Tate & Lyle, as well as major civic organizations like Rotary and Kiwanis.
Back in the 1980s, USAID supported research that established a link between Vitamin A deficiency and the blindness and death of children. We and other nations began programs to combat this problem, but a year ago, after new data underscored the severity of the problem, we decided that much more needed to be done. USAID therefore organized a coalition that includes other donor nations, international organizations like the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and major pharmaceutical and food companies.
One of the major strategies to deal with Vitamin A deficiency is through the fortification of staple foods, and U.S. companies have a huge role to play in the distribution of fortified foods. At the luncheon two days ago, the business leaders pledged their support to this ambitious program, which will soon save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.
It was inspiring to see the enthusiasm that Mrs. Clinton and the leaders of the food industry shared about this undertaking. This is the kind of partnership we in government must have with the private sector if we expect to cope with the very grave problems of hunger, malnutrition and disease that confront the world today.
The third partnership I will mention is closer to home. Agricultural university leaders from more than twenty countries met in Kiev last September and formed the Global Consortium of Agricultural Universities. And they wisely chose Dr. Martin Jischke, president of Iowa State University, as their founding president. The Consortium was formed to enable top agricultural and environmental educators and researchers around the world to seek solutions to global food security and environmental problems. Agricultural universities throughout the world play a leadership role as we respond to the challenges of global population increases, new opportunities for global cooperation, and technology developments. Clearly, to share information among them, government, the food industry, and private sector experts will benefit everyone.
To that end, the Consortium is holding its first global conference in Amsterdam on July 22-23. Its theme will be "Leadership for Higher Education in Agriculture," and more than one hundred agricultural leaders from around the world will attend. I’ve very happy to announce today that USAID will make a grant of $10,000 to support this important conference and will be one of its sponsors.
It is important for us to remember that all of these efforts – dealing with Vitamin A deficiency, developing new markets for American farmers, the work of the new Consortium – do not exist in isolation. They are all part of an effort by a great many people to answer a very important question, which is simply this: What kind of world we do want in the 21st century, for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren?
Let me quote from an essay the English political journalist, George Orwell, wrote in 1946: "No honest person claims that happiness is now a normal condition among human beings; but perhaps it could be made normal, and it is upon this question that all serious political controversy really turns."
When President Truman, General Marshall, and other leaders began our foreign assistance program, in aftermath of the most terrible war in history, it was because they believed that, someday, a decent life could be made normal for human beings everywhere
They would not live to see it happen, but they had the vision to take the first steps.
Today, we at USAID, along with a great many other people, still share that dream. We know the realities of war and famine and prejudice and greed, but we continue to think that life on this planet can be made better.
There are those who disagree, because they don’t care, or because they have an interest in preserving the status quo, and often they are very powerful.
That is why gatherings like this are so important, because they bring together people who share a belief in human progress. Thanks to modern air travel, thanks to the Internet, we are able to work together and plan together as never before in history.
Tomorrow, as part of this conference, young people from the U.S., Uganda, Zambia, and Ecuador will take part in a rural youth leadership discussion. That discussion will be watched via the Iowa Communications Network by students at high schools here in Iowa, and later will be shown to students in Africa.
What a wonderful step forward, to have young people from all over the world, linked by agriculture, linked by their hopes and dreams for the future, and now linked by technology.
We can only hope that these young people, in the years ahead, will build on our achievements, learn from our mistakes, and carry forward the dream of human progress to levels of achievement that my generation can hardly imagine.
Ultimately, we cannot know what the future holds, but we do know that by being here today we are playing a part in shaping the future. And we can also be sure that the hard work of farmers, all over the world, will be the foundation of whatever progress we achieve. Thank you for being here.
This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
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Last Updated on: July 12, 2001 |
