Water and Agriculture in U.S. Foreign Assistance

Synergy in USAID Programs - Water and Agriculture in U.S. Foreign Assistance

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

All right. I wanted to hear from Jim a little bit. It's, to put it mildly, a sobering picture of bureaucratic constraints, that you paint. And to me, it really makes me very uncomfortable. When I look back at what we're talking about this morning, what the United States could do in the sixties, when Pakistan had a huge security and development program, the United States brought the best of what it could. Now I hear an incredibly micro, you know, we deal with some refugees, the rest we can't deal with or we have to jump through a hundred... so when we hear, for example, in the Pakistan area, the United States is now bringing together the security part, the development part, what I hear from you is, count AID out of that because AID does little things all over the place, is not a part of a big picture. If I want to link in to the USDA, or I want to link in to CORE, or I want to link in the big picture players who have a lot of knowledge in the United States, don't turn to USAID. Is that the correct conclusion I should come to?

No. No, not at all.

Glad to hear it. Yeah.

And so, again, we wind up working, and there are times... my last position, I've been in Washington for a year, my last position was in Afghanistan. And I went there and I was told, you're in charge of building roads and doing electricity. Well, I'm a water engineer and I was told not to do water. And I know there's a desperate need in Afghanistan to do water. Well, I found a way to do some water programs in my spare time. And at the same time, there was an ag program. And so the ag program... and then we had a water team that formed up in the mission. And so the agriculture office was always coming over to me and telling me, we need your roads for access to market. We need your electricity, your energy, for processing of these, even for the carpet makers that were sending their carpets to Pakistan to be clipped. And so, there's a lot of synergies that are recognized in USAID, and that when you get a mission with money, like Afghanistan, then you have freedom to do many, many things. If you get a mission that has, say, ten million dollars, and say, for example, that four of them were earmarks, and then they're very narrowly defined programs on what they're going to do. So I believe the USAID can wind up still doing the same types of activities, but the only time you see them really breaking free is when there's a lot of money that allows it. And so, AID still has the capacity to work like they did in the past. The unfortunate part, and that's why I say I don't really want to beat up on earmarks because they're the reason that I have money to work on water, and people tend to think that I'm, I don't know, disparaging the way I have to work. But at the same time, we do have opportunities, we have ways and means of breaking through these barriers they put in our way in accomplishing things. And yes, we can, I'm sure there's going to be agriculture, there's going to be food security program in Pakistan and there will be other things. So I know there's health, I know there's education, I don't know what the other programs are going to be there, but all of these things kind of assume a life of their own, and many, many times they're based on the highest level government interface that we have, of a president asking our president or our secretary of state or our AID administrator, we need your support. And that's how it all translates into us getting involved in us being able to work on different activities. Just -- as far as back in Jordan, we had three programs, and one was economic growth, water, and health. And those were cross-cutting, because water benefitted the economic growth and the health and vice versa. And so there are many, many times when programs and missions put things together so that different parts of the program fit, and ideally again, that's the way we should be working always.

I understand that we have an internet question from -- Jenny Lee is our gateway to the cyber world. So I have two questions, gentlemen. The first is, how does USAID work hand in hand with NGOs in implementing projects at the grass root level, any success stories? And the second is, is increasing use of eco-fuel a threat to food security? How should we use water efficiently, both for food and energy? Michael, would you like to begin on either one or both of those? Probably USAID, Jim would want to take on.