USAID, Advisory Board Pledge to Boost Agriculture Aid
FrontLines - April 2009
By John Waggoner
WASHINGTON—The United States has neglected its efforts to help agriculture in the developing world in recent years and the new Obama administration intends to reverse that course, said Karen Turner, director of USAID’s Office of Development Partners.
The depreciation of agriculture
in USAID’s portfolio in the last decades was due to a misplaced complacency, she told the February meeting of the Board for International Food & Agricultural Development (BIFAD).
BIFAD advises USAID on agricultural development policies
under the Famine Prevention
and Freedom from Hunger Act. It is the only USAID advisory
board whose members are presidentially appointed. BIFAD receives technical, administrative, and financial support through the Agency.
In the past, USAID was guilty of “not adequately articulating what we wanted to do” and the board was sometimes seen as dictating “what to do,” Turner said.
Moving forward, she said, it is incumbent on both partners
that work be “jointly defined.”
The February meeting, held at the National Press Club, was hailed as an opportunity
to redefine the USAID/BIFAD relationship and to focus on food security.
Turner referred extensively
to President Barack Obama’s inaugural address in her keynote speech.
“To the people of poor nations,” she said, quoting the new U.S. president, “we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.”
The sense of importance—
if not urgency—of reinvigorating the U.S. commitment to global agricultural
development was palpable at the event, which hosted agricultural economists,
researchers, deans of agricultural colleges from around the country, and professors of agronomy, hydrology, and animal husbandry.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in January called the commitment to alleviating hunger worldwide
“a top priority” of the administration.
Another backdrop for the February meeting between USAID officials and the advisory panel were the food price protests and riots unleashed in more than 30 countries from every region of the world as a result of price spikes in 2007 and 2008. Though 2009 ushered in a dip in food prices, the lessons of the last two years have elevated
the issue of global food security as a major development and national security challenge.
Also at the meeting, BIFAD Chairman Robert Easter of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Tim Rabon, a New Mexico rancher; and H.H. Barlow, a Kentucky dairyman, reported on a visit to Kenya last year, where they found farmers and herders interested in learning
how to improve herds and marketing.
They said they were impressed by the passion of USAID development officers
in the field and the complexity of their mission. They also said they are convinced
of the benefits that could be gained from greater collaboration with their counterparts in the developing
world.
★
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