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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Andrew S. Natsios
Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
Administrator-designate
U.S. Agency for International Development
April 25, 2001
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, for the opportunity to present testimony on my nomination by the President to be Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. I would first like to introduce my wife Elizabeth, and our 14 year old son Philip. Our other two children, Emily and Alex, are attending college.
Let me begin with a story. On one of my first trips to Africa as USAID's Director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance I visited the town of Mugalama in Mozambique during the civil war in 1989. It was surrounded by one of the warring factions and thus cut off from food supply in a region where the agricultural system had been virtually destroyed. Nothing looked terribly unusual, but as we went from hut to hut we realized the village was dying, most of the families were too weakened from hunger to even move out of their huts. World Vision, which was working in the area, began an airlift that day with USAID funding because I had the authority to authorize emergency expenditures on the spot. I visited the same area after the peace agreement had been signed where World Vision, once again with USAID funding, had begun large-scale agricultural reconstruction programs with improved seed varieties, better grain storage, and new roads to export surpluses. The whole region had been transformed from complete desolation into an Eden-like area of rich agricultural bounty. I have seen some of the most terrible events of the past decades and some great triumphs as well. Mozambique after terrible suffering was one of the triumphs.
I thought I would make a few comments about my own philosophic prejudices, my view of the world, and of the foreign assistance programs of the United States government.
Four principles frame my world view.
- I believe that we live in a fallen world inhabited by imperfect people who stubbornly resist other people's dreams of paradise. That is why violent revolution nearly always ends up disappointing or horrifying.
- I believe that a universal moral order exists and that while our foreign policy should be focused on protecting and furthering our broad national interests, it can not stray too far from the constraints moral principle places on our actions as a nation.
- I believe that incremental reforms to remedy terrible injustice, carefully implemented, over the longer term can make gradual improvements in the world. There are few quick fixes.
- I believe that the family, the local community, religious institutions, and the private sector form the foundation of a stable and prosperous society.
As a great power, I believe America must have a foreign assistance program to accomplish its foreign policy objectives and to express the deep humanitarian instincts of the American people. Properly managed it is a powerful instrument for the President to influence the course of events around the world. Too often we see military force and diplomacy as the only instruments at his command, when in fact foreign assistance is sometimes the most appropriate and potentially the more likely to succeed, when diplomacy is not enough or military force imprudent. A peaceful, stable, and civilized world order is very much in the interest of the United States as the sole remaining superpower with the world's largest economy. A well-administered foreign assistance program can assist the President and the Secretary of State in advancing that interest. Should I be confirmed as Administrator, I want to assure the committee that I will be clear about whom I work for and who my boss is: I report to and serve under the direction of the Secretary of State.
The two most distinctive trends in the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall have been globalization and conflict. The rise of the internet, of a more open international trading and financial system, the spread of democratic capitalism as the preferred model of political and economic development, contrast remarkably with the increase in the number of failed or failing states and the increasing number of civil wars, many of enormous brutality.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), along with the rest of our foreign policy apparatus, has adjusted too slowly over the last decade to these two challenges.
Nearly two-thirds of the countries with USAID field missions have been ravaged by civil conflict over the past five years, in some cases destroying years of economic and political progress. I have witnessed the horror of these conflicts, the widespread starvation of civilians, terrible atrocities, the collapse of governments and national economies.
First with USAID and then with World Vision, I worked to rescue the victims from these catastrophes. Should I be confirmed, USAID will begin a deliberate effort to focus its limited program funds on conflict prevention and resolution, in conjunction with already existing efforts at the State and Defense Departments. We had warning signs of the Rwandan genocide well before it occurred; because we did not act on them nearly a million people are dead and central Africa has been plunged into a civil war which has killed nearly two million additional people.
According to the Carnegie Commission for Preventing Deadly Conflict, total NATO peacekeeping and humanitarian aid efforts in Bosnia cost $53 billion. Surely it is better to prevent disasters, such as Rwanda and Bosnia, before they occur, than to clean up the mess after it is too late.
The globalization of the world economy has meant that governments, while still essential, are not the only institutions through which public services are provided. The role of religious institutions, non-governmental organizations, private foundations, universities, and the private market economy in providing services and accomplishing public objectives has dramatically increased. USAID will undertake a much more systematic effort to leverage its funds and technical expertise with those of these private institutions to serve poor people in the developing world and build stronger self-sustaining local institutions. These partnerships will profoundly change the model through which USAID does its business with a much greater role for private institutions in development in the future.
Without economic growth no development is ultimately sustainable. I would like to focus more of USAID's resources on economic development to reduce poverty and on agricultural development to reduce hunger and malnutrition. The American free market approach to both agricultural and economic development provide important lessons which USAID should do more to share with the developing world. For much of the third world, economic growth and poverty reduction are synonymous with agriculture since 75 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas. All countries that have graduated from the third to the first world, have begun with their agricultural sectors. The last fifteen years have not been good to agriculture programs in USAID: agricultural development funding has declined from $1.2 billion in 1985 to $300 million this year. In 1985, USAID had 258 agricultural scientists and agricultural economists, when I left the first Bush Administration that had declined to 183, now there are only 48 left. I believe this situation must be reversed.
USAID has and will continue to maintain preeminent international leadership in health. Its programs in women's reproductive health, child survival, HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases, and nutrition are among the best in the world. The HIV/AIDS epidemic is now reaching such catastrophic levels it is decimating entire societies, creating negative population growth rates: we are beginning to see famine-like conditions developing in some particularly hard hit countries. Secretary Powell has pledged a 10 percent increase in USAID's HIV/AIDS funding for FY 2002, a pledge we will keep with a heavy emphasis on prevention--the best use of limited resources.
USAID must do business differently. The Agency cannot make sweeping changes to its business model without completely overhauling the central management systems through which USAID does its work. The procurement system, finance and budgeting systems, personnel system, and information management systems are in advanced states of paralysis or disrepair. The books of USAID have been unauditable for four years. In a recent study of federal agencies, USAID finished second to last in a survey of whether the personnel system rewards managers for accomplishing the objectives of the agency. Another survey reports that the procurement system is so dysfunctional USAID proportionately loses more legal challenges by contractors than any other federal agency. USAID spent $100 million on a management information system that had to be scrapped. While some progress has been made in fixing these systems, it has been too slow, and neither innovative nor sweeping enough to get the job done. USAID's career officers are demoralized and frustrated by these systems, which make it nearly impossible for them to get their work done. They want to help me overhaul the systems. Should I be confirmed, I intend to spend my first year personally supervising the reconstruction of these four critical management systems. My management style is consultative, open, and direct.
In addition to these management reforms I hope the Congress will consider earmarks reform, to reduce the number and intrusiveness of earmarks, the inflexibility of which makes it very difficult for USAID to get its work done, show any creativity, or customize USAID programs in the field to the local situation. In exchange for earmarks reform, USAID would agree to create a new model for doing business, and deliver better results and improved management.
During World War II, the German army stripped Greece of its meager food supply to provision Rommel's army in North Africa. The famine which followed killed 500,000 Greeks, nearly 10 percent of the population of the country. One of the victims was my great uncle. The story of his suffering and death has been told and retold in my family for four generations.
It took twenty years before Greece could begin to produce large agricultural surpluses, after receiving support from the U.S. government agricultural development programs run by USAID's predecessor agency, and after graduating a generation of Greek farmers from the American Farm School, a school still supported by USAID through the American Schools and Hospitals Abroad program. In 1963, my parents took me to visit my grandparents' villages which were desperately poor. Thirty years later I returned with my wife and children to see the same villages, now prosperous and charming, which were exporting their agricultural surpluses to the European Union. Free trade, agricultural and rural investment had created a miracle in three decades. Greece will not see a famine again because it has entered the ranks of first world countries. Foreign assistance does work, but it takes years of investment and hard work.
I look forward to working with the Committee to create a new USAID. Things are going to change.
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Last Updated on: January 02, 2009 |
