WHAT DEVELOPING COUNTRIES NEED TO ACHIEVE FOOD SECURITY
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Speaker: Andrew Natsios
Ambassador Kenneth M. Quinn
I think I mentioned this morning that we want this to be the most significant observance of World Food Day of anyplace in the world, and I know we’re sort of here in Des Moines, Iowa, and it’s sort of audacious to be hoping to have that, but the program, I think, has just been terrific.
And Governor Vilsack and Secretary General Kofi Annan’s inspiring opening remarks, the panels giving perspectives from a world view and from a globalization, now more specialized panels, and we’ll go back and forth. And we have an emphasis on Africa built into this as well as on the United Nations. And Jeffrey Sachs’ wonderful address.
And, by the way, all of these are being recorded, and we will make them available. Either we’ll transcribe them and have them available on our web site, www.worldfoodprize.org. I won’t promise we’ll have it on this weekend since we’ll all collapse after this, but we’ll get it on as quickly as we can. We’ll try to put the sound recording on, so you can hear it again. A number of you asked us about that.
And now for the end of our first day, we’re going to conclude with two, I think, wonderfully and equally strong presentations. So if I could invite Andrew Natsios to come up and join me up here. Andrew. Being able to have Andrew Natsios is a special privilege for me. I was able to see firsthand the work that he did as the head of the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in the Bush administration when we both worked there when I was Deputy Assistant Secretary. We had Peter McPherson on this morning, two of the foremost directors of AID that we had in a long time.
If you look carefully at the bio of our laureate and of Andrew Natsios, there are an awful lot of similarities as you run through them. He was coordinator for Sudan; Catherine Bertini was working in Sudan. He was among the very first Americans to land in Afghanistan after 9/11 and begin the enormous and impressive AID program there. He is one of the great experts on North Korea, has a recent book, The Great North Korean Famine, published in 2001 by the U.S. Institute of Peace, run by our good friend, Dick Solomon. And Catherine Bertini has also done food assistance programs there.
And I believe, and I guess I’m a little prejudiced in this, but I think he has assembled the finest USAID team I think that I’ve ever seen and certainly in a generation working with him. And he has returned agriculture to the forefront of international development, moving focus back to food and hunger and malnutrition as a way of developing countries.
But there’s one thing that I have to tell you about him so that you’ll understand tonight that he’ll seem distracted. And you may speak to him and it’ll seem like he won’t hear – because he’s from Massachusetts and was a state representative in Massachusetts, was the head of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. And we have to talk about the toll rates afterwards. When I was going out to visit my children – one of my children lives in Massachusetts – Andrew was in charge of the “Big Dig” there. But tonight the American baseball, the Boston Red Sox are playing, and everyone from Massachusetts, I think has a religious obligation to follow that, just as everybody from Illinois followed the Chicago Cubs.
So with that, it’s my great pleasure to introduce to you the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, somebody I’m glad to say is a good friend, Andrew Natsios.
The Honorable Andrew Natsios
Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Thank you very much, Ken. I remember well our work together in the first Bush administration. I don’t have a chance to say some nice things about Catherine Bertini tonight, so I’m going to say them now, and then I’ll get into the substance of my remarks. She’s a personal friend of mine, even before she was the head of the World Food Programme, the executive director, she was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, and we worked together in the first administration, and we developed a warm friendship.
We actually were, we ran for office, both of us, unsuccessfully or we probably wouldn’t be here right now. I was very depressed when I was defeated in Massachusetts, and the pastor of my church said, “Andrew, there’s something else that you’ll be doing. You just don’t know what it is yet.” And that certainly happened to me. If anybody told me 15 years ago that I would be standing here as the head of USAID right now talking on this subject, I would tell them that they were mentally ill. But it’s happened, it’s happened.
So I want to make some comments about Catherine. She took over a U.N. agency which is probably the premiere agency right now in terms of size and competence in the U.N. system, if you ask people privately. They’ll all say every U.N. agency is wonderful, but they’re not all the same – I have to just tell you that. There is a big disparity.
When she took it over, it had some very serious problems, and there was even a move to have it merged into another U.N. agency. Between ‘92 and 2001, the period that she was the executive director, international support at WFP totaled $15.5 billion, mostly in food. The United States contributed 41% of that, $6.3 billion. We are the largest donor. And I was with the President a year and a half ago, and we were going over some data for a meeting with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. And I said, “Mr. President, do you know that 60% last year [this was the year before last] of all the food that went to the World Food Programme came from the United States?” He said, “Sixty percent? The American people don’t know that.” I said, “Maybe we should start telling them.” But he puts it in all his speeches now, and I have to tell him, “There are other U.N. agencies that we need to talk about in your speeches.” He’s very proud of our food aid donations to the U.N.
By the end of Catherine Bertini’s tenure, 39% of world food aid donations, total for all sources, through NGOs..., three and three-quarter million tons was being channeled through WFP, and that was not based on an assessed requirement. In other words WFP is a voluntary agency. They don’t get any money automatically. They get it because they do a good job. In my rule after working with the U.N. is if the agency is competent and well led, pour money into it. If it’s not, make a nice little contribution and go to an agency that is well run.
And Catherine Bertini, in my view, when she finished was the preeminent, not only leader on hunger issues and food aid issues and famine in the U.N., but also the finest manager and leader, easily, of any U.N. agency. And I don’t mean to denigrate my other friends in the U.N. But technically she was the best.
And we don’t talk about that a lot. What we talk about are the more sexy issues of hunger and malnutrition. But, you know, if you can’t manage a giant program with a lot of money and people, the people don’t get fed, the money isn’t spent properly; it’s spent in the wrong places. Management is one of the principal challenges for NGOs, aid agencies like my own, and U.N. agencies. And having people who are committed personally and ethically to our work, but also know how to run huge institutions and reform them, is critically important. And Catherine did that.
By the end of 2002 WFP feeding programs in the schools were feeding 15.6 million children in 64 countries. She led the WFP effort in averting food crises in places like Kosovo and East Timor in the late nineties in the Horn of Africa in 2000.
Her greatest triumph, I would say – and I’m a little biased because I worked with her so closely on it – was in Afghanistan. Before the terrorist attack... Some people thought our whole aid program for the U.S. started on September 11th. It did not. It had been going on for ten years earlier through three administrations. It was not a partisan question. And it was not to help the Taliban. It was to help the people of Afghanistan.
We saw from WFP, VAN maps, vulnerability assessment maps which Catherine invented – it’s now a regular thing; everybody asks where the VAN map is; actually, no one ever heard of a VAN map before she was the head of WFP – which tracked which provinces had the highest rates of malnutrition and which had to be targeted for which kinds of food aid. We never had that skill before, Catherine was at WFP.
And we saw data from WFP in the NGO community in the spring of 2001 that said there was going to be a massive famine in four or five months if we did not intervene. And we started sending teams, and Catherine sent teams and I did and the NGO community with UNICEF. And we began a massive effort. Between October of 2001, just two weeks after the terrorist attack on the United States, in April of 2002 WFP delivered nearly 350,000 metric tons of food. And I had to give almost daily reports to the President. He was really focused on whether this famine was going to take place or not, and he wanted to know the tonages delivered.
And I told Catherine on the phone, “Please, make sure the stuff gets delivered, because if I don’t have a good answer, if I get embarrassed in front of Secretary Powell...” who was also very focused on this, along with my friend, Ann Veneman, who was processing all this food... We work with the Department of Agriculture people in Kansas where the center is for USDA, to do the processing. We order the food through the Department of Agriculture offices in the Midwest for WFP and the NGO community.
And we avoided a famine. We saved perhaps a million people’s lives in Afghanistan. And it was Catherine Bertini who led that fight. And she deserves credit, in my view, for stopping what could have been one of the major catastrophes in the beginning of the 21st century.
Fifty-six WFP staffers were killed in the line of duty in the ten years that she was the head of the WFP. And she worked tirelessly, and this is because WFP works in the middle of war zones. You know, people think the only time people are getting killed in these emergencies is in Afghanistan right now and Iraq. That’s not true. It’s just in the newspapers now because there are American troops there. Our people have been getting killed. I lost five people in my little office in AID in the first administration, aid workers getting killed.
The NGOs – I worked for World Vision for five years, one of the largest NGOs in the world. We lost 42 people in four years. The aid workers are at risk in many of these emergencies. Catherine set up one of the most elaborate and sophisticated security systems in any of the federal agencies and created specialized training courses to train 5,000 WFP staff on security issues to reduce the number of people who are at risk.
She moved 75% of her staff out of Rome into the field – where people belong, in my view. And she invented the Financial Management Improvement program, which she launched in the 1990s. She also established the first inspector general program of any U.N. agency and lowered WFP administrative overhead to the lowest of any U.N. agency.
Anyway, I wanted to say that, Catherine, with you sitting here, because I don’t think you’ve been recognized adequately – not just for your work on world hunger but for your superb institutional leadership as a manager and leader, which I think, frankly, we need to Xerox you and send you all over the world, Catherine.
I do want to talk now about a policy issue that’s of great concern to me. And I think Ann Veneman, my good friend, the Secretary of Agriculture, is going to talk about it, too. But I’m sure there’s not going to be a lot of repetition because this is a big subject. And that is the question of agricultural productivity in the developing world.
Most people don’t know this, but since 1980 50% of the improved agricultural productivity in the developing world is from improved seed varieties. And a large portion of that was through the work that Norman Borlaug started during the Green Revolution in Asia in the 1960s, but also through the CGIAR network, the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research, which is a sub-unit of the World Bank.
It’s a set of 16 or 17 research stations around the world, and they do excellent work. Pedro Sanchez, who got the award last year, was the head of the Tropical Forestry Institute in Kenya, which is one of these centers. Their work has been instrumental in getting into the developing world improved seed varieties that have increased productivity and reduced the requirements for inputs.
We use some of that seed, after the risk of famine was over in Afghanistan, to introduce improved varieties of wheat so that wheat production would go up 60-70% and that was drought-resistant, because Afghanistan has droughts quite frequently, and that’s what induces the famine sometimes.
And so we now have in the agricultural system large amounts of seed developed by these international research institutes within the international system. The United States government has been the largest donor since the sixties, and we increase. ...Simmons and I, the assistant administrator, our senior agricultural economist in AID, increased the funding for that, because I’m so committed to the research work, as is Secretary Powell.
What you need is improved seed technology from the scientists, the right economic policies – because we get the wrong policies, people will get discouraged from producing more food because they can’t get returns for the cost they invest in inputs. We had this happen in Ethiopia two years ago. We’re having a famine this year, a terrible problem. We put a million tons of food through WFP and the NGOs into Ethiopia. Catherine’s successor, Jim Morris, has been instrumental in that effort. But I’m about to see Meles Zenawi, the prime minister, to tell him what we all have agreed to and his government has agreed to, that unless Ethiopia changes its policies, we can invest all the money we want in their agricultural system and it will not improve.
Two years ago, I think it was two or three years ago, we made these investments, particularly the Europeans, in agriculture in Ethiopia. They produced more food, and the prices collapsed because there’s no exchangeability with the Ethiopian currency. There were trade restrictions; they could not export their surplus to neighboring countries where there were droughts, to sell the food. So what happened? The price collapsed to 25% of its normal rate. And as a result of that, the farmers said, “We’re not growing anymore extra food. We’re going into bankruptcy. We couldn’t sell the food we grew because we couldn’t export it.”
So if you don’t have the right economic signals and the right economic policies, if you grow more food, you can actually cause problems. You have to marry your economists with your scientists – that’s our rule, and that’s what we’re doing in our programs and I know a lot of developing countries.
We heard earlier today someone from Bangladesh. Bangladesh doubled their rice production, but they used market economics to do it, doubled rice production between 1985 and now. And there used to be terrible famines in Bangladesh. No one talks about famine in Bangladesh anymore, because production has increased so much, and industrialization is rapidly increasing people’s income that the country is developing at a very rapid rate right now.
The third thing you do is, you have to get these technologies, particularly in seed, out to the rural areas to the farmers – not just the big farmers; you need to do it to the big farmers and poor farmers. I’ve heard this debate for too long, and I’m sick of listening to it, that some people argue, economists argue – we should just help the big farmers because they’re most efficient. And I’ve heard NGO types say – no, don’t help the big farmers at all, just help the little farmers.
If we did that in the United States, we would still be poor and hungry ourselves. We didn’t distinguish, we didn’t just help one sector of our economy; we helped all of it. This is in the 19th century. What people don’t remember about America – particularly in the developing world... I say this, and people say, “I don’t believe you.” – In 1800 America was weak, unstable and very poor. We had large rates of malnutrition. We had disease epidemics.
My hometown in New England, in Massachusetts where I come from (and I am going to watch the Red Sox tonight, thank you), we had lost 20% of the population of our town in an epidemic in three weeks in 1831. No one even knows what the disease is today, but the rule, the mass graves in the town are terrible. People forget all that.
You know who our greatest development president was? Abraham Lincoln. Has nothing to do with the Civil War. He did three things which many countries in Africa are beginning to do now. There are three or four that are looking at what he did. He built infrastructure. He built the Continental Railroad – he approved the legislation – that tied the country together that allowed the surpluses of grain in the Middle West to be moved to the coast to ship to Europe and around the world. Without the train system, we couldn’t move our surpluses around, we couldn’t move seed around and fertilizer around either, which are also necessary to increase production.
Second thing he did – the land grant college system: Iowa State, the University of Massachusetts. And they educated people in two subjects in those schools – teachers to educate our kids and agriculture schools, most of which are still functioning in the United States. How do you think we took scientific agriculture, what we knew about it in the 19th century, and extended it across the United States? It was through our agriculture schools. And who invented those? The land grant college system that was signed into law in the 1860s. People forget about that. And it meant poor farmers could go to school, learn how to grow more food and become middle class.
The third thing he did was the Homestead Act. He signed the law that said, if you live in your land a certain number of years, you can get a hundred acres of land free, to settle the Midwest and the West. That meant that we created a class of middle-class farmers who in fact became the backbone of America for a century.
Now, it’s very interesting, something that happened in Asia. Three countries that were extremely poor – in fact, they were among the poorest countries in the world in the 1950s – Japan, because of what happened in World War II, Taiwan, and South Korea. If you looked at the people born during that period, they’re much shorter. If you go to the cities and see the younger people in those two countries, they’re as tall as I am. Why is that? Why are those three countries now among the wealthiest countries in the world?
General MacArthur enforced land reform in Japan and distributed the futile estates to the middle class. What he created was a middle class of farmers, and it was the most successful land reform in the history of the world, next to Taiwan’s, which was the most successful. And the focus then was not on the cities, it was in the rural areas.
One of the major mistakes we’ve made in development is, because the cities are growing, we’ve redirected all of our rural aid into the cities. And my staff of urban scientists sociologists are very upset with me. I said, “Look, we don’t want them to move to the cities. The cities don’t have the infrastructure in the third world to take them.” We need to work in the rural areas to keep people there, to make life better with health clinics and roads and schools, but most importantly to increase agricultural production, to increase family income.
Now, I’d like to talk about something that is troubling to me in terms of misunderstandings, because if we’re going to do this right, we need science wedded with economics, as I said earlier. One of the most important new things that could revolutionize agriculture, particularly in Africa, is biotechnology. It’s very controversial, but I need to talk about it, because I’m very troubled that politics is overtaking science in dealing with this issue.
There is a view that biotechnology only affects or helps big farmers. That is simply not the case. For example, BT cotton, which is grown now by small farmers in South Africa, China and India, in the Macatini Flats in South Africa, 70% of the cotton that is grown is BT cotton, which is a biotech cotton. Most of the farmers who grow it are women. And by planting it, they have increased their family incomes in a matter of two years by 30%, and they’ve also reduced pesticide use and reduced overall back-breaking work on the farms.
We are now providing grants to five prominent South African scientists to develop new seed varieties for African agro’s climatic growing regions in Africa, because the kinds of seed we develop here are not necessarily usable in Africa under the circumstances. In India the same kind of cotton is being tested, and there’s been a yield increase of up to 87%. The average farm size in India now is five acres, and so there’s enormous potential for this.
Some people think that the only research being done is being done in Western Europe and the United States in biotechnology, or in Canada. Let me tell you, I just opened with the minister of agriculture, (not “just” – a year and a half ago), a biotech research center in India. The minister of agriculture is a very visionary figure; he wanted to do this for years. We finally got the money together, with the Egyptian government. I was stunned when I was there to find a third of the Egyptian agricultural system is now modernized agriculture, comparable to the United States. They’re even using the drip technology the Israelis developed for desert areas. And huge areas of land that were desert are now, using drip technology, productive areas of Egyptian agriculture.
That was done in laboratories. It was done by scientists. Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Uganda, South Africa and Kenya are all making commitments to do research in biotechnology to improve productivity.
We also know biotechnology has a wonderful effect, or can have a good effect, in reducing pesticide use and herbicide use. The New York Times has reported that in China farmers who adopt biotech cotton no longer need a drug called atropine. You know what atropine is? If you get poisoned by certain kinds of poisons, you take atropine to prevent yourself from dying. Atropine was widely used in Chinese farms because pesticide poisoning is so common. Thousands of Chinese farmers and their kids would die of pesticide poisoning each year because of the inappropriate use of it. There’s been a dramatic reduction of atropine use on the farms, because they’re not using the pesticide anymore because of the BT cotton and the other kinds of cotton they’re growing that is biotech.
So what we don’t do sometimes over this controversial subject is look at what the alternatives are. We need to weigh carefully the different alternative ways of approaching this. Per Pinstrup-Andersen, who I think spoke earlier today, my good friend who used to be the head one of the CGIAR research centers, wrote a wonderful book with a colleague of his – and he’s not an American; you could tell from his accent, he’s a Dane – called Seeds of Contention, which is on the use of biotechnology in the developing world and how we need to analyze this properly.
There are also other things that are beneficial. The most exciting thing I’ve seen in the developing world, in South Africa they’re taking a gene from a diminimous, a plant that requires almost no water to grow, and they’re taking it and putting it in white corn to see if they can grow a corn variety that needs very, very little rain – because Africa has the lowest irrigation rates in the world and needs rain-fed agriculture to produce its food – to see whether or not we can produce a grain variety that will be favorable in African climactic conditions, which are erratic; some years there’s good rain and sometimes there isn’t.
The last thing we’re doing – which I want to mention before I think I can answer one question with the time remaining – is in the area of micronutrients. You saw here the previous speakers talk about what happens when there are micronutrient deficiencies.
There are two ways to deal with this. One is to give people a pill or put micronutrients in the grain that’s milled. That’s a good way to do it, but it’s not the best way. The best way is to eat a balanced diet, and a lot of countries in the developing world do not have food sources that have all the micronutrients naturally in the product without adding it in.
You know where we get most of our micronutrients in the United States? Anybody know? In the early 1950s there was a huge debate in the United States, very emotional debate about the fact that our cereals, produced by Post and Kellogg and the rest, had no vitamins in them. There were calories in it, but that’s it, calories and sugar. And if you look at the side of a box of cereal, you will see added into all of our cereals in the United States are all the major micronutrients. That’s how our kids get their micronutrients, guaranteed, is through our cereal boxes.
Well, they don’t have cereal boxes in most developing countries, particularly the poorest countries, so what’s the alternative? Change the diet.
In Mozambique right now we have now introduced sweet potato varieties from the Andes Mountains and from other parts of Africa that have very, very high levels of vitamin A, which is one of the great miracle micronutrients or minerals. And a child taking two doses of vitamin A a year will have a 25% reduced rate from dying from childhood illnesses before they’re five. It is a miracle drug because it strengthens our immune system.
How are we going to get it into people’s hands so they just eat it naturally? Through the sweet potato. A hundred and twenty-five NGOs in Mozambique took seed cuttings from an improved variety of sweet potato that’s very high beta carotene, extended through the country. It’s now in the food system. We had to introduce a new variety from the Andes that was more bitter, because the men did not like the sweet potato, the sweetness of it; only children and women did. The men liked something more bitter, so we have two varieties now, one to appeal to the men’s taste and one to apply to the women and children’s taste.
But the point here is taking agriculture and marrying it with nutrition makes a huge difference in the context of the agricultural system.
So anyway, those are some of my comments, and I’m hoping we can get past the politics of the trade war between Europe and the United States so that Africans, many of whom want to do this – they’re afraid that if they start experimenting with this, developing their own research centers, they will get drawn into the trade war and hurt their export potential, which would be a great tragedy in my view.
So, thank you very much, and God speed to all of you.