FOCUS
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 Washington 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 Inspection 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.
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 Program Office, charged with analyzing the effects of global
climate change and “representing USDA on U.S. delegations 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 competence and historically was its strong suit. Unfortunately, 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 further 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 circulars 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 traditionally 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-
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.
… And New Challenges
Then there are the resurrected and the new agenda
items. The Foreign Agricultural Service’s return to national 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 marketing, but initially to rebuild the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture, and then to manage the work of USDA technical
assistance advisers and members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams.
Today about 50 USDA employees are assigned to
Iraq and Afghanistan in such areas as extension education, animal health, water and soil conservation, and conservation 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 account for 31 percent of GDP and 80 percent of employment.
In addition, as food security concerns emerge globally, FAS domestic analysts and field officers are being
called on to gauge food availability not strictly for pur-
