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02 October 2009

This Week from Washington, October 2

Podcast on agricultural development and emergency aid to Samoa area

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The United States is getting back into the work of helping poor, developing countries increase their agricultural output, a policy it abandoned nearly three decades ago, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said recently.

In a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York September 25, she said the United States moved away from investments in agricultural productivity and toward emergency food aid in the 1980s. Now, revitalizing global agriculture is one of the most ambitious and comprehensive diplomacy and development efforts the United States has ever undertaken, Clinton said.

Former President Bill Clinton, in introductory remarks, said that the United States and other wealthy nations abandoned agricultural development policies, believing that food aid would bring economic benefit to the food-exporting countries. This belief persisted through both Democratic and Republican administrations alike, including the Clinton administration, the former president said.

Secretary Clinton said that the Obama administration pledged at the G8 Summit in July to spend a minimum of $3.5 billion during the next three years to help poor countries improve food production. More than 1 billion people, one-sixth of the world’s population, suffer from chronic hunger now, and global food supplies must grow by 50 percent in the next two decades to meet expected demand, according to the U.S. government.

Secretary Clinton said the world’s typical small farmer is a woman living in a village in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia or Latin America, who farms a piece of land that she does not own. The daily effort to grow, buy or sell food is the defining struggle of their lives. The Obama administration’s efforts are guided by several principles, according to Clinton, including agricultural investment, coordination across countries and regions, and the use of multilateral development organizations, such as the World Bank. Another principle puts women at the heart of efforts to find solutions. Microfinance and other programs assist women who are entrepreneurial, accountable and practical. Expanding such programs will help women invest their earnings in their families and communities.

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, called FEMA, is sending two disaster assessment teams to American Samoa. Along with a team from the U.S. Coast Guard, they will assess the impact of an earthquake and the resulting tsunami that struck the area. Early on September 29, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck deep in the Pacific Ocean floor midway between the Samoa and American Samoa island groups in the South Pacific.

Immediately following the earthquake, a tsunami struck Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga, causing widespread destruction, some deaths and injuries, and extensive flooding, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.

Warning Center officials issued a series of tsunami warnings after the earthquake. The messages indicated that destructive tsunamis could strike coastlines near the epicenter within minutes and more distant coastlines within hours. The center monitored sea levels and tsunami arrival times continuously in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Obama declared the Territory of American Samoa a major disaster area late September 29 and ordered federal aid to supplement territory and local recovery efforts, the White House said. The aid will support “urgent life-sustaining and public health and safety measures.”

The December 2004 tsunami across the Indian Ocean ultimately led to the deaths of more than 225,000 people across 11 countries, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. An early warning tsunami system with adequate equipment was not available to most of the areas struck by that tsunami. But geophysicists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii told local newspapers that two technological innovations have helped to sharpen forecasting and warnings that help save lives.

In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, there has been an expanded use of Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami buoys in the world’s oceans. The buoys report wave movements following earthquakes to alert warning centers, which determine the scope of the threat. The warning centers can then advise communities across a broad area, usually within minutes of the initial earthquake report. Another factor has been the development of a tsunami modeling system that effectively predicts the speed, size and strength of tsunamis following earthquakes.

President Obama said that the United States stands ready to help friends in neighboring Samoa and throughout the region, and that the many people who have been touched by this tragedy remain in Americans’  thoughts and prayers.

This podcast is produced by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Information Programs. Links to other Internet sites or opinions expressed should not be considered an endorsement of other content and views.

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