The Foreign Service Journal, May 2009

30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 9 New sanitary and phytosanitary measures based on pseudo-science and technical barriers to trade could prove to be the 21st-century version of the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. FAS officials in Washing- ton and field officers abroad will have their hands full keeping trade from shrinking in the face of new non-tariff barriers, as well as both coordinating the international work of U.S. agencies involved in SPS matters (USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspec- tion Service, plus the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and National Marine Fisheries Service) and interacting with their foreign counterparts. This part of the portfolio already accounts for about half of the work of the average FAS overseas office and will continue to grow. … And New Challenges Then there are the resurrected and the new agenda items. The Foreign Agricultural Service’s return to na- tional security issues, following its forced departure from that arena in April 1954, was heralded in 2003 with the posting of agricultural officers to Baghdad. They went not for the traditional FAS missions of analysis and mar- keting, but initially to rebuild the Iraqi Ministry of Agri- culture, and then to manage the work of USDA technical assistance advisers and members of Provincial Recon- struction Teams. Today about 50 USDA employees are assigned to Iraq and Afghanistan in such areas as extension educa- tion, animal health, water and soil conservation, and con- servation of biodiversity. As former Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker points out, agriculture has historically been critical to Iraq’s economy, and today employs one- quarter of the work force, generating 10 percent of gross domestic product even in an economy dominated by oil. Its importance is even greater in Afghanistan, where the underperforming agricultural sector is estimated to ac- count for 31 percent of GDP and 80 percent of employ- ment. In addition, as food security concerns emerge glob- ally, FAS domestic analysts and field officers are being called on to gauge food availability not strictly for pur- poses of market development, but to predict nutritional shortfalls and assess prospects for unrest due to food shortages. This work harkens back to World War II, when for strategic reasons USDA analysts in the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations calculated food availability in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and forecast how much wheat should be set aside to feed homeless and displaced refugees after the war was over. Sec. Vilsack has created a new Global Change Pro- gram Office, charged with analyzing the effects of global climate change and “representing USDA on U.S. dele- gations to international climate change discussions.” This is a new field of endeavor for USDA and, given the global nature of climate change, for its international arm, the Foreign Agricultural Service. With our satellite imagery office in Washington and network of field offices able to monitor, report on and forecast events, on paper we are well positioned to contribute substantially to this new mandate. The Office of Global Analysis within FAS has already set up a unit to cover global climate change. Foreign agricultural analysis is FAS’s oldest core com- petence and historically was its strong suit. Unfortu- nately, the agency’s in-house analytical capability was seriously eroded in the 1990s, due to overemphasis on marketing at the expense of research, and damaged fur- ther by abolition of the commodity analysis branches in the 2006 reorganization. As a result, despite the heroic efforts of a dwindling number of old-line analysts, much of the institutional analytical capacity that made FAS cir- culars must-reads in years past has been lost. Today FAS struggles to meet demands for analytical services, such as a study of most-vulnerable countries during last year’s global “food crisis.” Increasingly, the overseas posts are burdened with analytical tasks tradi- tionally handled in Washington — such as quantifying this year’s projected drop in U.S. agricultural exports to major trading partners, an econometric task for which they are singularly ill-suited — and with serving as the agency’s institutional memory. With half its Foreign Service staff already eligible for retirement, a lack of up- and-coming analytical talent due to periodic hiring freezes, and a graying Civil Service, the agency faces se- F O C U S In the face of a budget shortfall, FAS is expected not only to carry out its traditional mission of export promotion but to assume new responsibilities.