Water and Agriculture in U.S. Foreign Assistance

Programmatic Issues - Water and Agriculture in U.S. Foreign Assistance

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

Thank you. And then Jim, a question for you. You've already mentioned how food security is now on the list. We had the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act before, now concern that we saw highlighted during the discussion this morning on global warming. How do we put this all together from an organizational standpoint, and how do you try to fit the pieces of the puzzle together as we think about food, water, energy, population pressures, and now global warming is another key variable?

Complicated question.

Big question, I know. We have some modelers here, I'm sure dying to hear what you have to say on that one.

The thing that gives us, I guess, the blessing and the curse is that we get an earmark, and it's called a directive. Some people don't like to hear earmark any more. And the blessing is that that gives us money, and it gives us support from special interest groups in the Hill to do this work. And so, now global climate change is ramping up, and food security, agriculture, is ramping up. Now, the downside, the curse, is that it puts blinders on us where we can't combine different programs, and we can't do a biodiversity and form up a biodiversity, and a water supply, and an agriculture, because they want the money in separate pots, and they want the goals and the targets to be delineated for each of these. And so it's extremely complicated now for a mission to wind up saying, we're going to do some water projects, and they're going to impact these five different areas, which would have been the way we'd do business, integrated water resource management, in the old days. And now, and that's why I say, there's a watershed program, I believe it's in El Salvador, and they actually had to scrub out the water supply portion of that project, because it was biodiversity money. And so you wind up getting one arm tied behind you instead of being able to work and accomplish two things at once. You are forced to just make your project focus on one part of the water cycle. And so, like last year our water money was just wash activities. And everyone was screaming in the field. And actually, Africa went from twenty million up to a hundred million last year, but they were told after the fiscal year started that it was going to twenty to a hundred million, and by the way it can only be wash activities. Well, that created problems for a number of people because they didn't have extra money to do this program, and if they were planning on doing a water project, all of a sudden they had to shift their water project to do water supply or sanitation program. And so, these are the kind of things that we're trying to balance all the time, and so we have a global climate change team, and we have a water team, and we have a biodiversity team, and what we need to do is get them together all the time, to be able to work like we know we should be working, in the integrated fashion. And that if we do a project, we can have a priority, a primary goal for that project, but at the same time we accomplish these secondary ones. And so like, for example, if you were going to do with the agriculture food security money right now, what you'd have to do is, you'd have to show that that savings of agriculture efficiency turns over to a water supply in the city, and then you could say, okay, this is a WASH project and a food security project. But you have to track things that closely. You can't just free up water and say this benefits other portions of the water cycle. And so, that's why I'm saying it's ridiculous if you're going to do a watershed program, that you can't just take credit for cleaning up the water so you have better quality and better quantity downstream. And that translates for industry and municipal and agricultural and coastal and everything else. And so, I'm saying that it's a blessing and a curse and we wanted to work around that system. And it creates that stovepiping, enforces that stovepiping by financially handcuffing the projects.

Well, thank you both for addressing these questions, however inarticulate from me. Let's open up to a broader conversation here. Please, we'd like to hear from you. John, I was going to say, if you'd please stand up and identify yourself and your affiliation. But we already know John. Thank you.