Remarks by Andrew S. Natsios,
Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development

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Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Assistance
Washington, DC
May 14, 2003

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I've decided to try to make a PowerPoint presentation instead of just a lecture. I want to start by making a comment. I sort of try to keep my pulse on the community, the NGO community, the university community, the think tanks, broadly speaking, which are well-represented in ACVFA. That's why I come. It's not just good politics. It also is a good forum to explain what we're doing and to hear what you have to say.

One of the comments I've heard from friends is that a lot of people are not very happy about this focus we have on economic growth. They're upset about it. They won't say it to you, publicly, but they don't agree with you, and they think you're hurting the Agency, and you're diverting attention from sort of a social service view of what development is.

So I thought what we'd do today is present our new trade capacity-building strategy, which is now in written form; it's been published by PPC (USAID's Bureau of Policy and Program Coordination). We're unveiling it. Because when people say things like that, they don't kind of realize that if you say economic growth really is now what AID should do, what the community should be involved in, it's separate. It's what the banks do or it's even not good. I had some people in the NGO community say it destroys worker rights, it damages the environment. You go through a list of things.

I just have to say to you it's difficult for me to find anyone in the third world who would agree with that point of view. Poor people in the most remote areas say, "We're poor because we have no income. We can't keep our families fed and educated and healthy." And you can't find people in the ministries -- there are a few intellectuals a few places that might say that, and some Third World countries don't realize the Cold War is over, and Marxism has been a disaster -- but even the Marxists believe in economic growth. It was just a socialist sort of view how do to that, and they did it in a particularly rapacious way, in terms of the environment and worker rights. Just look at the mass graves that are being uncovered in Iraq now. There was a relationship between totalitarianism and this kind of barbarism and a centralized economic planning system.

But the point here is it's difficult to argue that poor countries become prosperous simply with social services. The central part of what I'm going to show in these remarks, I hope, is the connection between what we do as a community and the broader goal of economic growth. But, first, let me begin -- next slide please -- with a statement the President made, and we repeat this all the time. Read this very carefully. This is from the National Security Strategy of the President of the United States.

"America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones." Just that one sentence should indicate to you that there is a profound shift going on in the foreign policy establishment in the city. Why? Afghanistan is a failed state or was a failed state. Somalia is a nonexistent state. It hasn't had a government in 10 years now, only little governments here and there. And Iraq was a predatory state, maybe too much state, but failed in the traditional sense of what a civilized state does.

But clearly, this is the President's National Security Strategy. This is not AID's mission statement. I did not write this. I'd like to say I did, but I didn't. What do we do a lot of our work in? Failed or failing states. So this is now part of the National Security Strategy of the United States, and it says in the strategy, three pillars of our foreign policy: Defense, diplomacy and development. Clearly, I said it before. It's right in the strategy.

Now, this is very important. This (shows graph) was developed by Collier at the World Bank. The question is the connection between poverty and terrorism. If you look carefully at who committed the terrorist acts against the United States, they were not poor people. They were, one, educated and, two, they were from mostly middle-class families where they came from.

But there is clearly a relationship between the platforms that the terrorists groups operate from and failed states. Why is it? It's obvious. It's easier to function in a country where there is no national government, and the government doesn't have any control outside the capital city, than it is where you have a competent, functioning state and an army that is under democratic control, and a police force, and a diplomatic corps that can get help from other countries. So there is a relationship between terrorism and failed states and risks to us.

Development does beget stability. We know that. Now, this is Colliers' work. I don't know if you know Collier, head of the unit at the World Bank on conflict. I really have a great deal of respect for a lot of his work. He did this chart, and it's very interesting. For countries that are marginalized, that are outside the international system, that are outside development, that are not developing, that are not growing economically, that are not democratizing, look at the different factors that lead to high risk in terms of conflict. Income level is one of the highest correlations between marginalized states and risks in terms of conflicts.

Two-thirds of the countries in which AID has missions had a conflict of some sort in the last five years, two-thirds. That does not mean a full-scale Bosnian Civil War. It can be a regionalized conflict, an ethnic, a religious, a tribal conflict that's affecting part of the country, but it has a profound effect. It has a profound effect, and it is related to levels of development.

Economic growth is a key to poverty reduction because the only way poor people become prosperous is for their family incomes to rise over time, and it doesn't have to be very high rates of growth. In some ways, very high rates of growth can be dangerous, 13 or 14 percent, which some Asian countries have experienced.

There's a direct relationship between economic growth and gains in productivity, particularly in agriculture, because most of the poorest countries in the world are still agricultural economies. What's the relationship with growth? What do you need to have growth? Well, first, Hernando de Soto's work on property rights, particularly the informal sectors of economies, a critical part of growth. Transaction costs -- how much does it cost to do things? When Transparency International, an NGO out of Germany that we give a lot of money to through AID -- in fact, I think that we're their largest donors -- do their studies -- I didn't actually know how they did their studies of corruption. They actually send questionnaires to businesses, and they asked them, how many bribes do you have to pay to get something done? What percentage of your budget is composed of bribes? I didn't think they were that blunt, but they are.

You all know the problems you have getting licenses in some countries and what you have to do to get money into do your program because of the corruption within the system. And so, disconnecting economic power from political power, when economic power and political power are too closely married, you have serious problems among monopolistic and oligopolistic control and mercantilism, which is that the economic elites of the country avoid competition and avoid integration of the international system -- because they can't tolerate competition -- by controlling the economic regulatory power of the state to exclude new entrepreneurs and businesses and, as a result of that, the country does not grow economically.

This is a critical slide: how is it that countries develop economically. Now, let me connect what we all do to economic growth and then we'll connect growth to trade. It's very clear from all of the research that there's a relationship between good governance, stable governance and growth because you have to have the right policy framework in place. If you don't have a government that can write the right policy, that is captured by a mercantilist elite, for example, with monopolistic control, you will not have good governance, in terms of policy.

As I just said, if you have a civil war going in your country, how many people are going to invest? How many business people are going to set up a new business in the middle of a civil war? I mean, you might have black-market activities. I mean a legitimate business over the long term that employs people.

So we know that conflict management, conflict mitigation, and I would even say conflict prevention, which we do well at the grassroots level, has an affect on economic growth because you need stability in order for investment to take place.

The next level: the Asia giants. There are two factors in the investments of the Asian giants before they took off economically. This is in the '60s and '70s, according to a World Bank study. One is they invested in primary education. We did the same thing in the United States, by the way. There was a direct relationship between Horace Mann, from my home State of Massachusetts, and his reforms in the 1830s to require primary education for everyone and the rapid industrialization of the country. What was the first state that was industrialized? Massachusetts, my home state.

And if you look back, they had the earliest reforms, in terms of public education in the country. We also know there's a direct relationship between health and growth. Let me give you three examples.

I have businesses coming in now wanting to participate in the Global Development Alliance (USAID public/private partnerships). I say, "What is your biggest problem?" In countries with high HIV/AIDS rates, they say, "We train people; they get their masters degree, and then they die. Thirty-five years old, and they die from AIDS."

I went to a village in Darfur Province -- so the death rates among the technocratic elites, which are thin to begin with in the poorest countries, are being devastated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and they came in and said, "Tell us what we can do to stop this."

I said, "We've experimented with pilot programs. There are 10 things at work that we know work from the empirical studies that we've been doing, that Anne Peterson and her people in Global Health (a USAID bureau) have been doing with other donors, but we're one of the lead agencies, AID is, in this research. We know what works now, and the question is rolling out on a massive scale; it can affect the infection rates."

And they said, "Tell us what, we'll fund it, we'll work with you, we'll work with the NGO community because this is destroying our industrial base, which is our people."

Another example. I was in Darfur Province with Jim Kunder and people from OFDA in 1991 -- Darfur Province is in Western Sudan, near Libya. It's the "Wild West" of Northern Sudan. And we went to a village, and the birds were eating the whole crops. It's a sorghum crop. And I said, "Well, why aren't people harvesting the crop? It's ripe."

Why? The entire village had malaria. They literally could not get off their beds to go harvest the crop, and it was gone. What that meant was hunger later in the season because the harvest could not be taken in. There is a direct relationship between productivity and health, and the graph shows that in a number of different countries up above this.

Now, some people in the environmental community say it's bad to have growth. Wrong. The countries that protect the environment the most are wealthy, developed countries. Now, in the process of getting there sometimes, the environment is despoiled, but guess who protects better the environment, dictatorships, autocratic totalitarian regimes or democracies? Democracies do. Why? Because of citizen outrage over despoiling the environment.

Look at the Aral Sea, what the Soviets did. What the Soviet Union did under communism to the environment in all of the Soviet states is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. Look at what happened to Iraq in the last 20 years. We're watching now what's happened to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The rivers literally have huge amounts of just untreated sewage just dumped into the river. Their dam systems filled up because there are no agreements among the river basins to manage the water flow in those rivers, and the irrigation system is so mismanaged and has not been invested in, there's been a massive salinization of the soils in many agricultural areas, so production is going down because the water is being mismanaged severely.

And now in Basra, if you go down there, the water flow is so low, and that's where they get their water from. By the way, why are the child mortality rates so high? It's because of the water system. It's not being well-managed. The environment has been despoiled. There has not been good management of water in that country.

Second example. The biodiversity of the planet has been damaged by the destruction of the rain forests. Now, people in the United States like wildlife, and there's sort of this romantic notion, there's a direct relationship between agricultural productivity and biodiversity. I'll give you one example of this.

Rich Bissell, when he was head of the Global Bureau -- it used to be called R&D, 12 years, 13 years ago, right? -- told me this story. He had a group of farmers come in from Texas, sorghum farmers. We don't eat sorghum, but we feed it to our animals in the United States, and he said they thanked AID for a new sorghum variety that was developed because they didn't have to spend $350 million a year in pesticides and herbicides or pesticides and something against plant viruses that attack sorghum because they found a wild sorghum variety, I think it was in the Congo -- this was not GMO, by the way, but this was a matching, a cross-breeding of the wild sorghum with American sorghum -- that was resistant to a whole variety of diseases and insects, which meant and they no longer had to spray with this very expensive pesticide.

We're, by the way, using the same kind of improved sorghum varieties in a number of African countries. That was done because we discovered this wild sorghum growing in one of the forest lands neighboring one of the rain forests.

The whole point here is the Third World is rich in biodiversity in a way that can help science solve some of our most serious problems. So resource management, natural resource management, is directly related to responsible growth, and a lot of the things we do to preserve the forest land is critically important to preserve that biodiversity.

Business enterprise. Michael Porter argues that there's a direct relationship between the productivity of firms and the productivity improvements in a national economy. You can see all of his books in the Harvard Business Review. He's doing work all over the Third World. We formed an alliance with him. I think I told you that he gave a two-hour lecture to our senior staff. We videotaped it, and it's been shown to every AID mission all over the world.

And, finally, the thing we're going to discuss in more depth today, trade and investment. I could go into more depth in each of these areas and how they relate directly to economic growth, and you can all guess how these things are related, but they are related to growth. They all fit together in a very coherent, integrated way, and we have to think of them holistically and not in separate sectors, which is what we do too much in the development sector.

Now, you know why I'm obsessed with this agriculture thing, but let me just say it again. Of the 49 least-developed countries in the world, 80 percent of the people are farmers or herders or they live in rural areas. Now, are they moving to the cities? Yes, because the agricultural systems are so unproductive.

Now, I found out something yesterday. I was doing a Ministers of Agriculture meeting in Sacramento, California, and USDA is doing a conference with them, and I can't go so I did this videotape. Fifty percent of the improvements in agricultural productivity in the Third World are from improved seed varieties in the last 20 years. Fifty percent, fifty percent.

So there's a relationship between science and technology and increasing incomes among poor people in rural areas. Worldwide, two-thirds of the poor live in rural areas, and we do know that as incomes rise in rural areas and poverties diminish, the tendency to move to the large urban areas that do not have the infrastructure to handle these migrations diminishes.

So we can reduce the stress in the urban areas in many Third World countries by simply making life a little more decent in the rural areas. Rural electrification, for example, has a profound effect on growth rates all over the developing world. I've seen it myself in villages that were recently electrified, where people, as soon as the sun went down, they went to bed because there was nothing else to do, and the ability to do a whole variety of things you couldn't do before take place when electrification occurs.

There's a whole new strategy -- it's not new, it's two years old now -- but we're still refining it on agriculture.

The Foreign Aid and the National Interests Report, which I know you're going to be doing more work on, in terms of reviewing, making suggestions and updates, and thinking of ways that we can operate or initialize some of this, demonstrates that productivity and competitiveness depend on a favorable business climate, and there are a variety of things that are connected to this.

It's very interesting to hear people in the business community talk about the importance of civil society. I had Jerry Bremmer in, the new coordinator for Iraq, who is now supervisor to Jay Garner. He came and visited. We had an interesting conversation. I thought that he was reading Alexander de Tocqueville, my great hero in terms of civil society. And he said the most abusive states are states where there's no civil society to constrain the abuses. There's no private organization. There's no independent business community, there's no newspapers, there's no university system that is truly independent enough to constrain the power of the state to do terrible things. And he said one of the most important things in Iraq is to develop civil society in a robust and flourishing way, to stabilize the society and to bring a stability to it that only comes from the grassroots.

The sophistication of companies is directly related to the national business environment. There's a couple of books that I've actually been giving out to heads of state. I brought one to Meles Zenwai, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, in January, when I visited because -- by the way, there is a drought there, sadly. We were doing a huge amount. We are up to 800,000 tons of food, but things are deteriorating. And I met with him because Ethiopia hasn't quite accepted the need for market reforms in the agricultural sector, and I think that's part of the problem.

But I gave him the book, Porter's book, and he said, "I already read that, Andrew, but I think what you just gave me is a later edition, and it seems to be different than the first edition, and so I'm going to read this, too."

So people in the developing world, heads of state, apparently read Porter and take him very seriously. Porter is one of the people that argues, when he talks to us, about the importance of the NGO community, the importance of health, the importance of the environment, of worker rights, to have a stable, growing economy, and he made the connection. I didn't even ask. He did it himself in this way.

What are the microeconomic foundations of development? Reitchek [ph] came in one day, and I don't know if you know this, but his wife is a Bolivian national. I mean she's living in America now, but they met I think when he was, in his earlier career in Latin America, and he said, Bolivia democratized in the mid '80s. They had macroeconomic reform, and they've grown a little bit, but they're still unstable, as you saw recently. Why has there not been economic growth? The argument we make is that, without the microeconomic reforms around the tax system, without using the universities to train more entrepreneurs, without micro-finance institutions to develop new businesses at the grassroots level, without helping the rural areas process different kinds of agricultural commodities you risk failure. So Porter's theory is that it's at the microeconomic level where we've been failing.

If you have the right map, you have a stable currency, you don't have inflation, you have a relatively balanced budget -- you go through this set of things you do, and it's not sufficient. Even when you have democracy, it is not sufficient. You must also do the microeconomic reform.

Now, the global economy is presenting us an opportunity to link development to the Doha Round. I know there's been a lot of criticism of our agricultural policies. I understand why. We have put forward a serious proposal, as of last year, at Doha, to go with a completely free market in the agricultural system. We would not be facing the famine we're facing in Ethiopia if we had no trade barriers, regional trade barriers. Forget North-South trade in Africa.

Farmers grew a surplus last year in Ethiopia, and prices collapsed because they could not export the food because there are trade barriers in East Africa to trade, and the currencies are not convertible, and there aren't enough roads to move the surplus around.

So the farmers said -- the price dropped 20 percent of the normal level. You know what the farmer said? I'm now in debt. I grew a huge surplus; I can't sell it, it's rotting. I'm getting 20 percent of what I should get. I am not going to grow any more surplus, so they didn't.

The drought in Ethiopia is not universal. It's only in the east. The highlands were okay, the west was okay. They could have easily grown the needed surplus to feed the rest of the country, and they did not do it. Why? The incentives were wrong because there had not been regional trade integration in the country. There's a relationship between humanitarian crises and economic policy, a direct relationship.

Now, this (slide) is very interesting. This is in our report, and one of our economists worked on this along with the World Bank. Those countries that have integrated into the global economy are the normal integrators. High-income countries are us, you know, the Western countries. Slow integrators are countries that, for a variety of political reasons, refuse to reduce trade barriers and integrate into the global economy. You see what their growth rates look like.

Now, if you took away oil from the Middle East, and you aggregated from Morocco all the way to Iran, and you took out oil as a factor in gross national product, you add it all together, their GNPs would be less than that of Finland, a country of 4 million people. I don't know if you know that. It's a World Bank statistic. I use it everywhere.

The oil exporters had growth, but they have a finite resource, and of course at some point it's going to run out. And in some ways the countries that have developed the best, like Costa Rica -- Costa Rica doesn't have any natural resources to speak of, really. They did not grow because they have no natural resources. The only natural resources they have is a stable political system. They abolished their military in 1949 because it interfered in politics too much, and they have their people. That's their big resource, and they now have a middle-class, functioning democracy with growth rates. People are investing in the country. It's a stable society. It's a large middle class that's growing, and Chile is the other example.

So you don't have to have natural resources. In fact, in some ways, if you have too much natural resource, like diamonds or oil or gold, you have corruption in the government which can destroy the whole political system.

What is trade capacity building? This gets to our final point here, which is there are three pillars to what we're doing. One is to strengthen the developing countries' participation in international trade negotiations. For example, we helped the Jordanian government push through 28 changes to national law so they can join the WTO. They had the fastest accession in the history of the World Trade Organization, and the King just pushed these through.

And I asked him, when I visited last year, I said, "Your Majesty, why did you do this?"

He said, "We are on limited time here. We're going to have a political explosion unless this country's economy grows, and we absorb surplus labor and young men have something to do."

I've said this before as a joke, and it's not a joke, the instability is primarily caused by young men between the ages of 15 and 30 in most of these countries, and you all know what I'm talking about. If there isn't a growing economy for jobs, for everyone, but particularly for that group, it causes political instability.

Since they joined WTO -- we signed a Free Trade Agreement with Jordan - the country has been growing at 4.5 to 5 percent. In fact, they're having to import labor now. One of the biggest problems in Jordan is they don't have an educated workforce to work in the factories that have been developed. They need more people, and they're now having to upgrade their educational system in order to get more women and men into the workforce who are trained, so they don't have to import labor from other countries.

The second role is implementing international trade agreements. It is not sufficient to reduce trade barriers to have trade improve. For example, the Europeans have very complex phytosanitary regulations, as we do, but they're worse in Europe. I was in Europe for a negotiation in Paris, and the Herald Tribune had this amusing article about the same time we were debating, you know, this European initiative called, "Everything but Arms." It's a good initiative. The problem is there are other barriers to trade, and they pointed out that there's a big market in Europe for, I think it's called Camel. It's a kind of cheese from Mali. It's very popular in Europe, but there are huge barriers in the phytosanitary code of the EU to importing it, so they stopped all of the production, and the herders in Mali can't sell it any more.

So we train countries in how to comply with the phytosanitary codes of Northern countries and of neighboring countries.

Customs reform. If you have to pay bribes at the border every time you export or import something, it does tend to restrain trade a little bit. Intellectual property rights, all sorts of regulatory regimes that might be legitimate stuff, but they're used for other purposes sometimes, corrupt purposes, and restrictive purposes.

And, finally, we work with countries in developing uniform commercial codes and regulation. We worked with countries in trying to use things like the AGOA legislation for Africa, which many people in this room supported, and it has resulted in a massive increase between Africa and the U.S. in terms of trade.

The World Bank estimates if there were no trade barriers anywhere in the world, it would result in an increase in income of Third World countries of $300 billion a year, a massive increase in GNP, and what the World Bank says is that two-thirds of that trade is not North-South trade.

So we do a lot of work, for example, with SADIC or the countries of Southern Africa, not to eliminate trade barriers between Europe, and America and Africa, but between countries within Southern Africa, to encourage trade substantially.

So these are some of the things we do.

Now, some people say why doesn't the Bank do this? The biggest provider of technical assistance to trade capacity building in the world by far is AID, not the banks. The Inter-American Bank is closest to us, but if you look at the next slide, you'll see where it all goes. Now, there are two different data sets here, and that's why there's a little bit of difference in cost.

The WTO definition of trade capacity building does not include infrastructure. We do include it in ours. You can see, and this is not a part of this thing, you'll notice that the Clinton administration also increased the amount of money for trade capacity building.

It's very popular within AID. If you ask many of our people in the field in the missions what they want more money, it's in this area. If you ask African ministers, Latin America, what they want, it's this. They want more help on this because they don't understand how to do this in many countries.

We spend more money than any of the banks by far. You see the World Bank and the IDA is half of what we spend on trade capacity building. The U.S. government, and the figures here on the left, it's U.S. government trade capacity building. That's the total for the whole U.S. government. AID is 70 percent of that. We did a study of all trade capacity building with all federal agencies, and we do 70 percent.

In Europe, we are acknowledged to be the world leader in this discipline, of all countries, of all institutions, whether international or bilateral. So we have a value-addedness that is quite unique.

Where are we spending this money? Well, we're not spending enough on the poorest countries, in my view, because of all of the restrictions and how we spend money, where we spend it and all of the earmarks and everything else, and all of the separate accounts, but we have begun to roll out more of this money being spent in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa geared to poor countries.

There are now three trade centers to train African ministers in trade capacity building; one in Kenya, there are 12 instructors there, one in Gabarone, Botswana, and Ghana. So we have three, and people are being trained all over Africa at these three trade centers. This is very popular, I have to say, and it's not just ministers that are being trained, but people at the technical level of different ministries within the business community.

There is an argument in the United States -- no one will say it in a meeting like this; well, someone might say it when I sit down -- this is really bad for America because it creates more competition and sucks jobs away. That's not true, I've got to tell you. Our trade with the developing world, both Africa and Latin America, is increasing in both directions, both directions. They're importing more of our stuff; we're importing more of their stuff. And that's what the whole idea of free trade is. You do what you do best. We'll stop doing it while you do it, and we're going to do what we do best, and you will import from us what we can do in a competitive environment, and it is working. It is working. Now, 40 percent of our exports go to the developing world now, 40 percent.

There are eight concrete goals in the National Security Strategy, and one of them is to ignite an era of global economic growth, free trade and free markets, but it has to also include the other things that we do or it doesn't work.

Now, the last point I want to make is this. There are people legitimately who say, if you have the kind of growth we've had in some Latin American countries, for example, we will have more inequity. In Brazil, there are two countries. There is the developed country in the South, people's incomes are $10,000, even workers in the cities make that much money. In the North, it's poorer than the poorest countries in Africa or in Central Asia, and that's true.

Latin America has the worst imbalance in terms of these kinds of income disparities. There's Lima, Peru, and then there's the rest of the country, and they're two worlds.

Now, Nancy Birdsall, not a Republican, let's say, was a chief economist at the Inter-American Bank. She did an excellent job in a speech, a lecture she gave, when Tony Hall was doing that fast, remember, about eight or nine years ago? I was at World Vision then, and I went representing them. And people didn't know what she was talking about. She gave the best lecture on this subject I've ever heard.

And she said we compared why there's so much inequity in Latin America and why in Asia they have the best distribution of wealth in the world. You know where the best distribution of wealth in the world is? It's in Taiwan. The least-income disparity. What is it that South Korea did, Japan did, Taiwan did, Thailand did, you go through the Asia giants, even the ones that have had problems, why is it their distribution of wealth is better? She reached one powerful conclusion.

In Latin America, all of the development resources in infrastructure went into the cities, nothing in the rural areas. In Brazil, 90 percent of the urban areas, people have electricity, 90 percent of the people who live in cities. In the rural areas, only 10 percent of the people have electricity. In Thailand, 60 percent of the people have electricity in the cities and 40 percent of the people in the rural areas have electricity. And if you do it in terms of roads, in terms of water and sanitation, in terms of schools and clinics, in Asia, they made a decision to do balanced development between rural areas and urban areas. In Latin America, they did exactly the opposite, and now you have income disparities.

What we do affects income distribution, not by redistributing income in a direct sense of the tax system. There's no evidence that that succeeds because it can damage economic growth when you literally confiscate wealth that way, but if you have a development program that equally develops the whole society, instead of favoring certain regions, then you can eliminate these income disparities and ensure that there is, in fact, equitable growth. That is our goal.

So this is what our strategy is. Does every NGO have to do trade capacity? No, it does not. Does every think tank have to work on this? No. But the notion that we shouldn't do it because the banks are doing it, the banks are not doing it anywhere near what we're doing. And you can see from the data very clearly we do more of it than anybody else does, and we do it better than anyone else, which is why there's a huge demand for it.

It works together. If there are increasing family incomes, there are going to be far fewer famines, let me just tell you. It's going to be easier to do agricultural work if there's an export market for the surpluses, whether it be in a neighboring country or the North-South trade. It is in the interests of poor people of the developing world if it's done right. We think we know how to do that. We need your help to do it. We need to work with you, but this is part of our strategy, and it does fit into our overall goals.

Thank you very much.

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