Water and Agriculture in U.S. Foreign Assistance

Impact of Financial Crisis - Water and Agriculture in U.S. Foreign Assistance

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

Now, a closely related question here, especially building on what Jim has just said about resources, is the whole nature of the current economic and financial crisis. Obviously that contributes a little bit of a roller coaster effect to broader public commitments in these areas. How do you think the financial crisis will affect longer-range foreign assistance, and in particular, assistance involving water and agriculture?

As far as we know, it's not going to affect us in the near-term, because right now it's just starting on both water... the land development goals are 2015, of having the people without access to water supply and sanitation, and so 2015 is kind of a marker, and people in Congress and special interest groups are realizing that the U.S. government hasn't done enough, and so I believe there's going to be an increased involvement in funding for us to 2015. Now, the agriculture thing started last year, and now AID is being criticized because we haven't been doing agriculture. And so I believe that the agriculture thing will run for a set period of time, at least until we get these longer-term programs up and in place. If we're doing something like ag research, and we're training people in other countries, these are programs of three to five year minimum time frame.