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2009 Summer Seminar Series
Back to 2009 Seminar Series
July 8
Asia's Future: Critical Thinking for a Changing Environment
Presenters: Geoffrey D. Dabelko, Director, Environmental Change and Security Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Mary Melnyk, Senior Advisor, Natural Resources Management, Asia and Middle East Bureaus, USAID
Howard-Yana Shapiro, Global Director, Plant Science and External Affairs, Mars, Incorporated, Adjunct Professor, College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, University of California, Davis
Jennifer L. Turner, Director, China Environment Forum, Woodrow Wilson Center
Moderator: Margot B. Ellis, Acting Assistant Administrator for Asia, USAID
PowerPoint presentations: J. Turner presentation (941 KB) | H. Shapiro presentation (1.50 MB) | M. Melnyk presentation (1.61 MB)
Seminar Summary | Question and Answer
Seminar Summary
While Asia has advantages in its soil and in its better infrastructure, its
large population and intensive extraction of resources make it the first region
to push the environment to the limit. The question becomes how best to conserve
the environment while allowing for increasing demand for food; increasing pressure
on the natural environment; and challenges such as global climate change and the
drive for economic growth, energy independence, and democracy.
Dr.Geoffrey Dabelko began the discussion with an overview of the Asia’s Futures. He was followed by Dr. Howard Shapiro,
who addressed the substance of the expert discussions. Dr. Jennifer Turner discussed China as an environmental
innovator and a threat. Dr. Mary Melnyk closed with key messages and the specific development implications.
Geoffrey D. Dabelko’s Presentation
Dr. Dabelko noted that the Asia’s Futures group tried to act on the notion that what is in the
periphery is not peripheral to core portfolios. The group sought people from the private sector,
from trade and commodity chains. They focused on energy and climate, governance, conflict,
economic trends, and downward trends. Their meetings took the form of consultations, sometimes
with groups similar in expertise but also with mixes of people who had no other way to run into each other.
In addition to consultations in Washington, San Francisco, New York, and in Asia with USAID; across the U.S.
government; and with these diverse groups, the group did trends research, trying to include all trends that
may matter, including ones not frequently looked at. The culminating event was an applied training workshop in
Bangkok with environmental officers from all of the relevant Asia missions, the regional folks, people
from Washington, and a set of experts to try to replicate the cross-fertilization process.
The trends were narrowed to six: rapid economic development and rising living standards in Asia;
globalization, trade, and demand for Asian natural resources; a rise in Asian science and technology
and how it connects to more traditional development programs; exploding energy demands in Asia and
globally; the projected effects of climate change and the Post-Kyoto mitigation approaches; and
finally, continued population growth to urbanization in a range of demographic dynamics. A big
theme was that of the interdependence and connectivity among these trends. The need for an
integrated response was also recognized.
Dr. Dabelko recalled an “all-star expert” who talked about a couple programs with an integrated
approach that are starting to see evidence that this approach is actually greater, more efficient,
and more cost efficient than some single sector approaches. It was just one example
in which the group started with a macro trend, discussed how it dictated an integrated response,
recognized that a program for doing it was underway and offering evidence of positive results,
and the group left seeing a way forward.
Howard-Yana Shapiro’s Presentation
Having spent much of his life in the field, Dr. Shapiro views most things from a specific and pragmatic translational
research perspective based on a pharmaceutical-industry background.
Dr. Shapiro spoke of “sustainagility” rather than “sustainability” in East Asia.
Having worked in the world’s worst possible spots, he theorizes that if you can make
something good in some place terrible, you should be able to make something good in some place good really easily.
It all comes down to soil and water. How to use those two resources will define
today and forevermore if we are going to have a world of hunger, or if we are going
to have a world of abundance. There’s plenty of rain, but we don’t collect and it
runs off the ground. It used to rain twelve months a year, and everyone was happy.
Now rain comes in thunderous moments, and you get 15 percent of your rain in a
24- to 48-hour period, and there’s nowhere to store it, so the advantage is lost.
People don’t think of degradation and social depravation in the same context, but they are inextricably linked.
Up until recently, when we talked about something like this, we based our models
on a narrow base of information as opposed to results-centered models where the
actions are understood. In the pharmaceutical world this is called translational research.
There may be a debate, but it is a rational debate now. He worries when he hears discussions
that aren’t data driven, scientific based, technology neutral.
In talking about the probability of meeting the future’s needs,
we must remember that there are success and failures. There was a
horrible failure in Indonesia with USAID in a program. But when it was
corrected and an improved program was taken to Vietnam, it was an incredible success.
Jared Diamond talked in his book, Collapse, about cutting down the last tree,
a metaphor for the destruction of Easter Island, and what that means. More generally,
it’s a comment on human frailty. First, it is the failure to perceive threats, to make plans,
and to execute them. Second, it is how the insulated decision makers with conflicting short and
long term interests embrace neither, which is sometimes the criticism of research that is
government funded, not just the U.S., but other places too. And third, it is sometimes hard
to make good decisions with changing circumstances. We get around those sorts of things by
bundling values. There is a multisectoral strategy for science technologies and development.
If we don’t bundle these values we are in a tough spot. The key is that no one part of the solution can do this alone.
Too often we can’t agree on the short term. We can’t agree on the long term.
We can’t have a tractable discussion. And so we live in this strange paradox.
Nothing decided, irresolute, drifting, as opposed to being powerful with our activities.
Jennifer Turner’s Presentation
China is in and of itself a big trend and a force to be reckoned with. It is the world’s factory, and
there is a lot of pollution. But while there are lots of problems, there are positive sides. One
that merits mention is that in a time of economic crisis, China’s economy has been growing at 10
percent GDP for the past 30 years and has been a force of economic growth and stability in the region.
Now—and it’s good for now—they say China’s stability will help us. But we do need to be a bit worried
because China’s economic growth has been built on a foundation of environmental degradation and growing
social inequities. That’s a problem.
China has a lot of air pollution. Coal and cars are some of the main drivers.
There are a lot of sulphur dioxide emissions impacting Korea and Japan. China’s pollution goes beyond the country,
and it is being driven by the fact that the economy is growing. They are burning lots of coal.
They are making cement, the source of 14 percent of China’s greenhouse gas emissions. The air
pollution is causing a health crisis. In China, 750,000 people a year die early from respiratory illnesses.
There is a lot of asthma. It’s also a threat to food security. Acid rain is
impacting about 30 percent of their agriculture. China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses now.
But they are taking the problem seriously.
One major trend for the region is the glaciers melting in the Tibetan plateau and
throughout the Himalayas. This is going to impact water for at least a billion
people throughout the region. They are not taking the climate impacts into account.
Right now there are about 200-plus dams being planned or in construction in Southwest China,
and a lot of those rivers flow out of the country and into Southeast Asia. The amount of
destruction of water and other resources in China may be at a scope and speed that is faster
than the rest of the region, but it’s not all that different. But, again, if China can start
addressing these problems, it also offers a lot of hope for the region.
Something like 40 percent of the water in China’s main river basins are of the
lowest quality, not for use for anything. But it is being used. So you have farmers
who can’t even sell their crops because it is known to be contaminated, and 190 million
people drink water in China that is making them sick. It is a source of instability. Protests
are growing in China around environmental issues. A lot of them are about water. The Chinese
government is concerned about them. A lot of laws have been revised, there is more public
participation, there are stricter standards, and even in the sphere of NGOs, China’s green
NGOs are probably the largest civil society sector. It is something that gives hope for optimism.
There is illegal trade in China in wildlife food. The Chinese government has been working with
international organizations to improve their monitoring and enforcement of this kind of trade.
But it has only driven the illegal traders to become more sophisticated.
China is number three in the world for investing in nanotech and emerging biotechnology.
The government sees that if they don’t address the environmental problems, they lose economic
growth, and they have instability, which is obviously bad for the region.
Our experts discussed the principal environmental challenges in the region that we need to pay
attention to as well as what are sorts of approaches we need to carry out in order to begin to
address these challenges and conserve the environment and improve human livelihoods and welfare
and security in the region.
Mary Melnyk's Presentation
An example of one principal challenges is Prey Long forest in Cambodia.
In its center it is the largest green area in the country. There are
hydroelectric dams and mines in this watershed, which feeds rice-growing areas in
Cambodia and some major fisheries. It demonstrates the large hunger for natural
resources and the need for these resources to feed economic development and growth.
There are also economic land concessions. These are essentially small plantations,
and some timber concessions. What will be the cumulative impact for this massive development?
What would be the impact on the ability of people to produce food and rice? What will be the water
supply in the near future? If it turns out that there is going to be food insecurity within Cambodia,
does that mean we have to start considering our development programs to move away from traditional
development assistance where we try to promote conservation and democracies to humanitarian assistance
where we spend all our time feeding these people. And where are they going to go?
Also among the challenges is glacial melt. In the Himalayas, for example, glaciers are retreating
by about 7 percent a year. There are some predictions that by 2035 they will be completely melted.
The major rivers in China, according to one statistic, supply the water for 300 million people in China,
and—depending on what the statistics are—up to 2 billion people depend upon these waters. So what
happens if the water disappears, the glaciers completely melt? What are the implications for future
water supply? How are we going to produce the food?
The particulate matter in the soot from the huge industry out of China
settles on the glacier melt. It’s dark. It attracts sunlight and heat, and glaciers
begin to melt. You see that the industrial pollution causes massive health risks and harm
to a local population, asthma, reduced productivity, and sickness. It also is melting the glaciers.
And there are also greenhouse gases, which are contributing to global warming. By cleaning up
industry we hit three problems right away. This moves us a little bit toward a single solution
with multiple benefits.
Another cause of the black soot going on the mountains is that
so much of cooking is done by firewood. Here, however, the cooking fires
inside the home are significant sources of indoor air pollution. And as a
result of that pollution, children get pneumonia. Pneumonia is a major cause
of child mortality. But in addition to the health cost, what are the labor costs?
Women dedicate a large amount of time to collecting the firewood.
There’s also the risk of glacial lakes bursting, and the glacial lake buildup
behind the natural gas underneath [speaks to risk reduction]. The plateau is a
watershed, and this is not what it should look like, with massive holes and patches
and issues of overgrazing. We need to consider ecological management of these areas as
well as pollution mitigation and adaptation to a decreased water supply. Part of that
ecological management is that we need a combination of scientific and indigenous knowledge, which is being lost.
One other environmental trend is carbon financing. With carbon financing,
we will finally be able to give financial values to forests that can compete with other
land uses such as plantation development. But with carbon financing comes risk. Corruption
is systemic in many of the governments that might be slated to receive the funding.
Many communities living in forests don’t have rights to those forests, are they going
to receive any of the benefits, how is the benefit sharing going to take place? If
these questions aren’t resolved we have massive issues of forest conflict.
In regard to approaches, the first thing is to start small and ask, are we asking the right questions?
Where are there points of intervention where we can address numerous challenges and have numerous
benefits? We need to focus on and provide greater recognition to the environmental security issue.
The environment and its conservation are important for maintaining people’s wellbeing, their livelihoods,
and their health. This is not work just for environmentalists and biologists. All sectors need to consider
this because one of the cumulative impacts will be political instability as well as social unrest. If
these trends continue resource scarcity can only increase.
Climate change is a very important part of that environmental security question.
USAID, for example, has a sixty year development history of improving livelihoods,
improving maternal and child health care. Yet climate change can put all of that at risk,
as well as our current programming and the stability of the society in which we work.
This is not something that environmentalists can do alone. We need to integrate
climate change concerns throughout everything that we do. It’s a question of coming together.
It’s important to form alliances. A holistic approach to environment is an approach that works:
linking science and technology with development, integrating indigenous solutions and partnerships.
What we do with population and family-planning interventions have health implications, have
environmental implications, and will shape the way we approach food security as well as
other income-generating projects.
Question and Answer
Question #1: What are your thoughts for moving ahead with the conclusions from the report? Will there be a discussion within AID or within the broader interagency?
The second question is how do we move forward with increasing the engagement of the private-sector companies consulted in this process, particularly related to food?
Answer #1:
Mary Melnyk: We’re just finishing up the final report and, personally, what I captured is only just the tip of the iceberg. I think we still have to go through where we are and where the points of intervention are. This is a process that is important, that continues. This process is one that others are picking up as well.
On your question on the private sector with China, India, and Indonesia, we have Howard here from Mars, obviously, and they have a major interest in and investment in Indonesia. In India we had someone from BP who was looking at renewable energy; we also had a representative from Unilever come in.
Howard-Yana Shapiro: I think one of the biggest things we saw, and it’s based on experience, especially with Unilever, was their study on soya and palm oil and what the actual effect was, the number of people who were both profiting and losing from that, that was done by Jason Clay with Oxfam. So that’s actually a pretty good study. It turns out their reach was much, much, much greater than ever thought, which surprised them because they’re in business after profitability, and when they realized how extensive it was, I think they saw that changes had to be made both in model production and how they collected, and every aspect of the supply chain.
In our case, we have a large presence in China. We also have a very large presence in Sulawesi and Sumatra with cacao and through a not so good project with USAID and then through a very good project with USAID the [farm and field] training schools are, I think, the model for excellence everywhere in the world now, and we took that to Vietnam where it was adopted.
We are seeing that in every aspect of every one of these projects, the private sector is inextricable. If you leave them out, something goes wrong. If you engage them with the farmers from the very beginning, the quality goes up. So, from our perspective, the projects that have been successful have had that integration from the very beginning.
Question #2: Understanding the cause of glacial melt is obviously very important to control it. Did the study get into a little bit more detail in analyzing the causes in terms of the relative role of specific global pollutants and to what extent it is also a reaction to regional and global temperature increases?
Answer #2:
Geoffrey Dabelko: We can certainly make the more detailed discussions available. In some ways we are trying to reflect them, but we are not the experts on it. There were lots of interim steps, and in that sense it was giving people that vision to have proper sessions and see it as something that could work within their portfolio and become real for them and not just somebody else’s job that may or may not impact them.
Jennifer Turner: I should note that on the Web site we’ve gathered lots and lots of reports. We created a Web site that’s meant to be a resource not just for USAID folks but for everyone. We all want you to be smart, I think, broadly about these trends.
Mary Melnyk: The objective of this was a broad brush look at what trends are coming down the road, what aren’t we thinking about. But I certainly appreciate your comment that reinforces the fact that what seems intractable, to use Howard’s words, is actually tractable if you go down to the local level, and there are things we can do.
Question #3: I recently heard a lot about this term called the biological commons. My understanding of it is that it represents a tension between people who think that they own the resource, their land at the local level, but who may not have actual property rights and then international companies that come in and actually take such things. The example I saw was the Neem tree, to actually develop drugs that are used more in western societies and maybe they are expensive and can’t necessarily be used in some of these poorer countries. What are your insights about this kind of issue? It seems this has implications at the policy level for these countries that have to address these kinds of issues. I wonder if you could talk to that.
Answer #3:
Howard-Yana Shapiro: I can make two direct comments. I am currently sequencing the Theobroma cacao genome, which is the source of chocolate, 1 of 22 species of Theobroma. One hundred percent of it will be in the public domain, accessible through a portal called Pipra, funded initially from Rockefeller but now through [Sasakau] in Japan. To access the information you have to check a little small box. And the language has been vetted in 42 international countries, which are high level scientific countries, “first tier.” It forbids you from patenting anything that you will gain from access to that information. So, that’s one way to do it. From our perspective, putting it in the public domain allows it to have free access to everybody for all time.
Now the Neem, there are two sequences. There is the WR Grace sequence. When they tried to patent a particular insecticidal protein that was found in Neem, that was thrown out by the world courts because it was longstanding in use.
Biopiracy has been around for as long as I can remember.
In the early ‘70s the Convention on the International trade in Endangered Species was put in place, which in theory was going to stop people from taking intellectual property that was developed locally and patent it for sale in other origins. Now the implication is that if you were to change a molecule, and say, I’ve added a molecule here on a carbon sequence, that you could patent that because it’s not Neem anymore, or it’s not "x" anymore, or it’s not "y" anymore, and that’s actually been an unfortunate scenario by international patent law. So it is a very big problem. I don’t know when the resolution is going to come. I know the EU is working its way through a series of resolutions on the use of indigenous plants. I think it is going to be probably ten years. Activism is probably the best way to forestall it.
There was another scenario with a company in Texas called RiceTech which patented a rice called Texmati, which was Basmati rice, and that has now been rejected. So it is a very fine line of what you can get away with and what you can’t get away with. The unfortunate world is that almost all plants that are developed for pharmaceuticals are protected either locally or internationally by the Plant Protection Variety Act. So someone can actually take something, breed it with other characteristics and make a patent on it. The rules and regulations are very, very complex. Are they 100% fair? Probably not. Are they somewhat fair? Probably some. I would call it a fairly intractable conversation at this point, to state it at the lowest level.
There have been some other areas where people had paid very little money for access to a plant and then following international outrage, they paid more, but still it was cause and effect as opposed to good behavior. Our hope is that good behavior becomes the norm as opposed to bad behavior.
Question #4: You talk about China’s air pollution and environmental changes but, as you know, North Korea is very close to China. What is the impact on North Korea, the Korean peninsula, from the air pollution?
Answer #4:
Jennifer Turner: Again, I didn’t go into depth, but China’s air pollution, the SO2 and dust from desertification and overextraction of those water resources has meant that desertification is going rapidly, and a lot of it is dust which carries pollutant with the SO2. Huge amounts of it go to Korea. We don’t know the exact impact on North Korea. The Koreas and Japan, they are the frontline in getting these pollutants, but they go further as well. Chinese coal has a lot of mercury in it, which they’ve found in rivers in Oregon. So again we can make guess work, but I’m sure it’s great.
Mary Melnyk: We have someone from the audience, I think, who can answer.
My name is [Sung He Jung] and I’m working for Goodfriends USA, a South Korean NGO working on North Korean human rights issue, and I read a lot about North Korea, so I can answer a little bit about that. Actually North Korea, because it is so impoverished, maybe many of you have seen the nights, you know, the Korean Peninsula where South Korea has a lot of lights, it is so bright, and North Korea is completely dark.
So you can imagine that the industry in North Korea is completely broken up, and many factories simply cannot run because they don’t have any electricity. But I also know that some factories which are running are really polluting the air so the people around the factory are complaining about it. But, overall, North Korea doesn’t have the ability to pollute the air very much, but the environmental degradation is so severe because people try to get anything from the mountains because they don’t have food. So, deforestation is so severe and environmental degradation is over the imagination.
Howard-Yana Shapiro: It’s not about the Korean Peninsula; it’s about Asia in general. I’m sure all of you remember a few years ago when the great fire of burning forests in Indonesia and Burma were going on, the pictures were everywhere in the news. A cloud of particulate matter headed west. You can’t really only think about what the pollution or the effect is. It decided to rest over West Africa, which gets about 75 inches of rainfall a year. In that year, the rainfall probably went down to 32 to 35 inches, so in an economy that is based in the rural sector on cocoa as the largest export crop, bigger than gold. And a casual economy of cassava, cocoa, yam, and plantains which is what basically is the whole [East-] West African economy. We were so close to the tipping point of the total breakdown and failure of the food system, it was all because of that cloud.
So, while it is easy to measure mercury in a river in Oregon because we have so much technology, we don’t really give as much attention to what happens around the tropics. But here was a clear case, very direct, the amount of carbon that was in the air that was trapping the rain before it could fall to the ground was catastrophic. And will it happen again? I hope not because we’ve slowed down the burning of the forest but given the right trends in atmospheric winds, it could happen again in a nanosecond.
Question #5: Recent studies are showing that to feed all the people who are going to be living on Earth by 2050, food production is going to have to double. President Obama has recently called for a green revolution like the one in the past decades to help meet this gap. But that combination of genetically modified crops and fertilizers has been shown to have disastrous environmental repercussions despite its tremendous success in India. So my question is how are these trends affecting how you look at solutions to these agricultural problems? And, for aid organizations, how are conservation plans being tailored to those problems or how will they be in the future?
Answer #5:
Howard-Yana Shapiro: First of all, you’re going to have to do more with less. It’s just the bottom line. And then once you accomplish that, you’re going to have to do even more with less again. It’s a multiplier effect. It’s not a single effect.
Your comment about GMOs and agricultural chemistry is one of the most intractable debates that exist in the world. I could bring people in here from very substantial institutions that would say it’s completely off; they’ve reduced the herbicides and pesticides by 700,000 metric tons. Depends who you believe; I can find you people who’ll tell you exactly the opposite.
However, the fact is we shouldn’t be talking about the green revolution anymore, as Norman Borlaug repeats every time he stands up at 96 years old. He basically says, “Why are you still talking about 1970?” What has happened since 1970 to 2007, almost 2009, almost 40 years? He was asked by those governments to solve a problem which was lodging of wheat. The wheat would fall over because it was too tall. So he and M.S. Swaminathan basically found a solution, and when he spoke, about four years ago, at the World Food Prize, he said, “The point was that it wasn’t to be in place forever. It was a stop-gap measure.”
So my point is, what is the solution? Traditional breeding using marker-assisted breeding, which comes from molecular biology, which developed largely because of biotechnology? Probably. Some form of biotechnology? Probably. But, as I said earlier, I don’t think we could even agree on the definition of genetically engineered, transgenic, [syngenic], any of those terms, and some of them are actually rather subtle. We are talking about, in the case of plants, [senescence], being able to reduce the water usage by up to 70%, water nutrient use efficiency, to take the water that you use 70% less, and the nutrients get down to almost a negligible use of that. All the plants are capable of that if we know how to turn them off and on.
So, do I see a multiple-faceted, complex-scenario solution for traditional breeding, traditional knowledge, molecular biology? I say everything is going to have its place, which is why I think the term “data-driven, technology-neutral” is the future.
Mary Melnyk: On the food security end, USAID is working strongly in trying to increase ag productivity in countries such as Africa. Africa is a major focus of the current food security initiatives, so that is where we are right now, and I can’t speak very much to it because I don’t work in Africa; however, looking forward and the sorts of statistics that you pointed out and Howard as well, I think this is where this integrated thinking needs to come in. I’m speaking as a scientist and as a biologist here, not as a development specialist. But if I were concerned about feeding people in the future, I think my first point would be trying to conserve what we have left, be that the soil or the water or capture the rainfall as a first step.
And there is a bit of good news because in many of these rural areas it is subsistence agriculture where it is rain-fed and improvements can be made, like the swale that Howard—that’s low impact appropriate technology. So there are opportunities for improvement, but we’ve got a way to go, and integration is an important key to that.
When we look at the food crisis, it’s not exclusively an input-based solution of increasing nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in the soil. But we also have to consider that the world is changing rapidly and there is decreasing water supply, but there are also opportunities.
Jennifer Turner: There is also the whole issue of governance. You’ve got to work at creating institutions, so that’s again the integration, looking at the cause and looking for the right point to put in.
Howard-Yana Shapiro: It’s not just food, it’s not just calories. It’s nutrition. How can we deliver nutrition? All the companies in the world, all the aid organizations have to really sit down at some point together and say how do you deliver nutrition? What is the model for delivering nutrition? Is it to mothers? Is it to young children?
How do you subsect that whole scenario and make it cheap enough for people to have? And it has to be room stable because the lack of conditioning for food is really very apparent in many parts of the world. It’s not just the environmental issue, can you raise food holistically? Can you really deliver the appropriate nutrition as well?
Question #6: My question is a process question for you: where is this moving? Are you intending to engage those bodies in Asia in this multisectoral look at the environment?
Answer #6:
Mary Melnyk: I appreciate your recommendation and suggestion to go beyond. Frankly, again, this is just the first initial report out. Internally we would have to institutionalize the idea as well. I think current efforts should focus on what we are doing and how we are doing and then go out. Or maybe we should do it simultaneously, since you’ve raised the question. But I think we have a job ahead of us in working on this internally as a first step. But your point is well taken.
Margot Ellis: I think the point of collaboration is important; I think we are already working with ASEAN and one of the missions. But increasingly we are looking at other partnerships. One of our proposals within the Asia bureau, which I think hopefully will move forward, is setting up a regional center for excellence for climate change based in Bangkok. The idea of having this center of excellence to translate science and technology to development solutions is not for USAID to be doing this in a vacuum. We very much have a field presence where we tend to establish partnerships with regional institutions as well as with USAID institutions that have supplied research. So it’s something we really want to integrate into all our programs, and we really are taking it very seriously.
Geoffrey Dabelko: We cited the Philippines example. One of the reasons that it has been successful in adoption is it has gotten the Philippine government at multiple levels interested because it is solving problems. And they are putting their money into it, and it’s not just externally supported, in some cases it is a combination, in some cases it is coalitions of mayors who are then going to the national level. You have much greater acceptance that this integrated approach is something they want to do. Their people have multiple challenges. They want to help provide multiple solutions. I think that, as much as that then can be reflected in some of the regional bodies as well as typical donor recipients expressing to donors a greater willingness for there to be a two-way dialogue rather than a one-way dialogue, offers some hope forward.
I think the other is the extra money in bringing in folks who have that kind of scientific background so that the results can be there. That takes some extra funding, some extra time, perhaps some extra expertise to have some control-comparison sites to really systematically demonstrate that integration is not just something that is intuitive and sounds great in principle but doesn’t actually bear out.
I think part of taking this forward is taking the approach that the folks in the Philippines did; they had control-comparison sites and integrated approaches and single sector approaches so that they could make some comparisons in terms of cost and efficacy and results across a broad range of indicators.
It implies one conclusion AID could take from this is we need to look at how we measure success, we need to have a broader view of what is an acceptable indicator; it may imply how donors as well as communities or officials on the ground are viewing success and willing to play across those lines.
Howard-Yana Shapiro: We don’t need to be precautionary. Sometimes institutions like USAID bring everything we need to the table, and sometimes we need to bring the game ahead of them, and they can play catch up very quickly and fill in their piece. I can tell you in Asia there is lots of work going on on the ground, whether it is World Wildlife Fund or Conservation International or any of the other conservation groups and businesses working very closely together and it is often ahead of government, and then the governments actually catch up and supply a fundamental and key piece. We’ve seen that in Vietnam. We saw that in Papua New Guinea. We are seeing it in Bougainville, the autonomous zone of PNG. We are seeing it in the Philippines. The ability to get on the ground, start the work on scale, and then partner with USAID is one of the critical paths because they do take a little longer.
Previous USAID Summer Seminars
Notes, Q&A transcripts, handouts, and slides from previous USAID Summer Seminar are available for the following years: 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004 and 2003.
How to Contact Us
Any questions concerning the Summer Seminars should be directed to the 2009 Summer Seminar Planning Team at ksc@usaid.gov
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