Thursday, November 4, 2010

International Development Strategies in the US

This is an old press release about the new directions the US will take in international development cooperation. Basically we will focus on two initiatives and their approaches. There is Feed the Future, which aims to promote food security throughout the world, focusing on a few countries at a time, and the Global Health Initiative, which aims to strengthen improve public health throughout the world. These are promising, fresh directions, and Feed the Future is especially a much-welcome refocusing on agriculture and food issues. In fact, last fall when I was in Washington, DC, I talked to some people at USAID, and even then they were telling me about the upcoming food security focus that would fund a few selected countries over each period.

All this said, I wonder how a country with a decrepit economy and fast-eroding trust in its currency and public institutions will manage to be a beacon for prosperity and development in the world. This will be all the more difficult with the herd of crypto-Nazis we've just elected into the House. It seems our legislators are unwilling to implement economic development initiatives on domestic soil, so how much good can we do elsewhere?

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