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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks of J. Brian Atwood, USAID Administrator
September 22, 1998
to the BIFAD Anniversary Dinner "Agricultural Innovation at Home and Abroad: Partnerships for Success"
I'm delighted to be here with you this evening to pay tribute to the record of agricultural innovation that has resulted from the fruitful partnerships between USAID and the land grant university community.In 1975, Congress passed the now-famous Title XII Legislation with two goals in mind:
- Increasing World Food Production, and
- Solving Food and Nutrition Problems in Developing countries.
Looking back to the early and mid-1970s, the global community was gaining an awareness that famines were not inevitable, and that, for example, South Asia would not necessarily starve, as many experts had predicted just a few years before.
What had a made the crucial difference, to change the destiny of entire regions was Agriculture. Not just agriculture as it had been practiced for centuries -- but a new, scientific agriculture -- built on decades of research by dedicated scientists, many of them Americans.
These were people of great vision -- men like Robert Chandler, Norman Borlaug, Orville Vogel and others too numerous to name.
They saw that the agriculture of developing countries could be transformed to provide food and prosperity to a degree far beyond what had previously been thought possible.
In the mid 1960s, the Green Revolution that resulted was making its mark, with rapidly increasing wheat and rice yields across Asia and in Mexico. There was a new generation of scientists and extension workers in developing countries, many trained in the American Land Grant University System, or in new universities in their home countries based on the land grant model. They helped to adapt and disseminate new -- and ultimately life-saving -- technologies to farm communities.
What grew out of the institutional partnering of American universities and their new counterparts in the developing world was, surely, one of USAID's great and lasting contributions. That partnership brought research, education and extension together in developing countries, often for the first time.
By the early 1970s, the role of scientific research was becoming more widely recognized in the development community. The international donor community came together to form the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Here at home this new vision was translated into an institutional reality in the Title XII legislation.
A key means for articulating and developing this new and more optimistic approach to the global food challenge came to life in the establishment of the presidentially-appointed Board on International Food and Agricultural Development, the BIFAD.
In the more than 20 years since its founding, BIFAD has helped to guide the Agency for International Development in grappling with one of the great global challenges. At this time, I would like to recognize and thank all the members of BIFAD, past and present, who have contributed to this long and important work, guiding the Agency through many ups, and also a few downs, for more than two decades.
I would also like to add that it has been a great personal pleasure for me to have worked so closely with Ed Schuh. His wisdom and experience have helped me and many others in USAID understand better both the lessons of the past and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in the great task of feeding the human family. You cannot know Ed Shuh without coming to appreciate the role of agriculture in spurring overall economic development.
When we look back at how this country and its partners in the international community have responded to the fundamental need for food and livelihood around the world, the record of accomplishment is phenomenal.
The percentage of malnourished people has fallen, and the lives and livelihoods of countless millions of rural families have dramatically improved. Food is more available -- at lower cost -- in many developing countries, both because of more productive seed varieties and because of policy reforms. USAID has actively fostered the reforms that have made food markets work more efficiently.
Those of you in this room who have personally been engaged in these programs should be enormously proud of your accomplishments and your contributions to world peace and prosperity.
Title XII legislation has played a major role in making these accomplishments possible.
In addition to the establishment of BIFAD, it laid the groundwork for a new means of marshalling the strength of the U.S. research establishment to help meet the global hunger challenge.The Collaborative Research Support Programs -- or CRSPs -- were established, making possible the great expansion of this country's Land Grant Universities in the global research effort. I would also like to thank all those, many of whom are here tonight, who have contributed to the more than 20 years of CRSP efforts bringing science to bear on solving important agricultural problems facing developing countries.
The CRSPs have also continued the important institutional work begun by the land grant system in earlier years. Some 18,000 people from around the world have received research training, ranging from short term courses to full-fledged PhD programs in an American university. A whole cadre of scientists trace many of their skills and contributions to their vital association with researchers from our Land Grant University community.
Title XII legislation also broke new ground by recognizing the value that agricultural development abroad brings to the American farm economy. This ethic of mutual benefit is fundamental to the CRSPs, which have always emphasized the shared nature of benefits deriving from agricultural research.
Last year alone, peanut farmers in just 3 states -- North Carolina, Texas and Oklahoma -- gained some $30 million in income from research conducted by the Peanut CRSP. Bean farmers in Nebraska and Colorado are drawing on CRSP technologies in the fight against a major disease epidemic.
Title XII legislation also envisioned a major role for the International Agricultural Research Centers. These, too, have made enormous contributions, both abroad and here at home, to increasing agricultural production. Each year, American wheat and rice farmers, and ultimately all consumers, reap hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits from CGIAR research.
The current BIFAD board has been particularly helpful in helping to shape a new vision of greater collaboration between the CGIAR and its partners in the U.S. university system. This year, USAID is awarding eight new competitive grants worth almost $2 million to U.S. university teams helping the international center solve key problems.
In addition, the international centers are using $2 million of USAID funds to support the collaborative efforts of their research partners in the United States.The close connections among agricultural research, agricultural development and international trade may not have been envisioned so clearly at the time Title XII was drafted. Technologies from the CRSPs and International Centers are helping farmers around the world break into the global economy. The Integrated Pest Management (IPM) CRSP, for example has developed example, new, environmentally techniques that are helping Guatemalan farmers to export snow peas valued at more than $100 million annually.
Trade also brings huge mutual benefits. More than half of U.S. farm exports now go to developing countries. These new markets have helped stimulate economic growth in America's country's heartland. Leaders like Senator Harkin have been outstanding advocates of the benefits of free and fair trade to agriculture.Rising incomes in developing countries mean greater demand for feed grains and many other agricultural products. And you can be sure that those Guatemalan farmers are purchasing knowledge-based products developed here in the United States.
BIFAD has guided our growing understanding of the importance and implications of agricultural development,serving as a constant source of analysis, perspective and wise counsel.
I have not always been able to fully follow BIFAD's advice as I have tried to balance other compelling development needs and budget priorities. Recent years have been particularly difficult as the Agency has struggled to carry out our mission despite serious budget reductions and Congressional directives that limited flexibility.
Nevertheless, our record of joint success in agricultural innovation and the leadership of the best and brightest in the U.S. university community gives me confidence for the future.
We have met Title XII's stated mandate to increase world food production many times over. But producing enough food for all the world's people is a constantly moving target. We have to keep up the pace.
We have not met the second stated mandate, "solving food and nutrition problems in the developing countries." Reaching that goal will require success in a broad range of development fields, include democracy and government and conflict resolution. Because of agricultural progress, the international community will be able to respond if we are called upon to the devastating floods in China and Bangladesh.
But in the places today where this is actual famine or likely to be in the coming months, there are leaders who are either impeding the international community's ability to help -- or actively pursuing policies of starving portions of their own people. The 50,000 Kosovars whose hunger could turn to starvation with the fast-approaching winter are not there because their crops failed. They fled for their lives because their government and their leaders failed them. They look down from the mountains on their burned homes and their fields where soldiers are trampling the crops they planted.
Wars do not cause the majority of the hunger and malnourishment in the world, but they can turn people from prosperous farms and picturesque villages into starving wraiths very quickly.
There were 800 million malnourished people in the world at the beginning of this year. The United States is committed to reducing malnourishment by half within the next 20 years.Yet already the number of malnourished people is growing as the Asian economic crisis drags on. Millions who thought they had escaped poverty are -- or will be -- jobless. Children are being pulled out of school.
Hunger is returning to places where we thought we had won the battle.
Solving the immediate human crises and addressing the longer term economic problems are a necessary part of ending hunger.
Current crises will again compete with the pressing need to step up the pace of agricultural progress.
Despite these disturbing realities, there is also some good news as this turbulent decade nears its end. Although there has been a lot of concern that the rate of agricultural production increases was levelling off, our latest figures indicate that average yields of major staple grains increased worldwide between 1992 and 1997. In developing countries alone, grain yields we up by more than 10 percent.
Net food availability, as a result, increased by more than 23 percent in the six-year period -- Per capita availability by more than 13 percent.
In fact, only in Africa did population growth outstrip growth in local agricultural production. This was caused by a combination of higher birthrates than in most of the world, increased vulnerability to adverse weather conditions, weak economic growth, and the disruptions of civil conflict. As a result, food availability declined for the continent overall.
I would be seriously remiss, too, if I did not acknowledge another important trend. Private sector involvement in agricultural research, as you know, increased rapidly in the United States during the 1980s. In the 1990s, that trend began to extend abroad. More open, private-sector dominated markets provided the incentives.
Research-oriented agribusinesses are increasingly stepping into the traditionally "public" domain of agricultural technology development and extension.
I think I recognize this point from the old Western movies of my childhood. Just when things are looking a bit bleak for the hero, the bugle blows and you know the cavalry is sending in new troops.
I have felt many times during my tenure at USAID like the drunk who -- when asked how his bed caught on fire -- pleaded, "The bed was on fire when I got in it."
The bed WAS already on fire when I got here. I've been trying to stamp out the flames for more than five years.
Fortunately, I have had the BIFAD board and the university and agricultural communities manning the hoses and toting a lot of water during that time to help as new fires broke. Without your help and support, I might have been consumed long ago.
As a matter of fact, my eyebrows felt singed the last time I testified before Congress.
BIFAD has guided my growing understanding of the importance and implications of agricultural development. The board has served as a constant source of analysis, perspective and wise counsel.
I have not always been able to fully follow that advice as I have tried to balance agricultural needs with other compelling development needs and budget priorities. These years have been particularly difficult as the Agency has struggled to carry out our mission despite serious budget reductions and Congressional directives that limited flexibility. Nevertheless, our record of joint success in agricultural innovation and the leadership of the best and brightest in the U.S. university community gives me confidence for the future.
The framers of Title XII faced complex challenges and had to balance their optimism with realism. In the face of predictions of mass starvation, their faith was bolstered by their deep understanding of what it would mean to prevent famines and truly achieve freedom from hunger.
We have seen what it HAS meant for millions of people around the world. That achievement is enormous. The challenge before us, too, is huge:
First, with the already staggering number of undernourished now growing -- at least temporarily -- we must help the American people understand that constantly increasing food production is not automatic -- another decade, another agricultural miracle.
Reducing malnourishment by half will require a tremendous effort, drawing on governments, the private sector and all of civil society. Meeting the challenge of the World Food Summit, to reduce that number by half will require concerted action. And much of that action needs to begin now and in the next 2 or 3 years--we know that agricultural research and development takes years, and we must build that time lag into our plan.It is also important that we recognize that meeting the challenge may be tougher than in the past -- as we face a shortage of good farmland, a growing scarcity of water and other serious environmental problems. Fortunately, science is providing us with important new tools for tackling these constraints, but success will not come easy.
Second, we must all recognize the fundamental relationship between hunger and solving problems across the development spectrum. Health and child survival, environmental degradation, education and empowerment of women are among the most compelling.Third, while food security cannot prevent all conflict, it is the cornerstone of conflict prevention and societal development. That understanding must be reflected in a level of effort and budgetary support commensurate with the huge savings -- in lives and dollars -- that its achieving worldwide food security could bring.
And fourth, here at home, American farmers, agribusiness, the educational establishment, the NGO community and others must come together to support and carry out a strategy to end hunger.
Ending hunger is in everybody's best interests, from the poor farmer on a tiny patch of land in the Sahel to the farmer using state-of-the-art technology on a thousand acre spread in Iowa. It serves the security needs of every nation, every enlightened leader, every person that walks the earth.
It is a goal to satisfy the most immanently sensible and practical -- and to inspire the most idealistic.
Harkin Introduction
I'm pleased to introduce our keynote speaker, Tom Harkin, United States Senator from Iowa. As a fourth generation Iowan, father of two, Navy veteran and graduate of Iowa State University, Tom Harkin is a product of small town Iowa. He graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in Government and Economics.
After college, Tom served as a jet pilot in the Navy on active duty from 1962 to 1967, then flew three more years in the active Naval Reserves.
He defeated an incumbent in 1974, to win election to the Iowa's Fifth Congressional District, the most conservative district in the state.
That tells you a lot about Tom, and about Iowa, too. In 1984, Tom again challenged an incumbent, and won election the U.S. Senate. Iowans returned Tom to the U.S. Senate in 1990 and again in 1996, making him the first Iowa Democrat ever to earn a third term in the U.S. Senate.Senator Harkin is a friend of agriculture both domestically and internationally and, I am proud to say, a friend of USAID.
Although he needs no introduction to this audience, I am happy to present our keynote speaker --
-- Senator Tom Harkin.
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 18, 2001 |
