MFAN member John Glenn writes about the importance of the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s first round of impact evaluations, which were released yesterday. Glenn points to the evaluations as a model for transparency, showing where the programs were successful in meeting targets and where more can be done to have a longer-term impact on improving household income. This post originally appeared on the USGLC blog.

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In today’s constrained budget environment, there is a constant drumbeat for focusing on results for taxpayer dollars.  And there should be, but just as often it’s hard to know what the results actually are, let alone whether they worked.  The Millennium Challenge Corporation has led the way in pioneering rigorous evaluation in its country selection and compact evaluations for years in global development, and the release of its first five independent impact evaluations is worth paying attention to.

The evaluations found that the MCC programs met and even exceeded the program targets they set for themselves.  But where most government agencies stop there, the MCC took the next step to ask if their program targets actually met their broader mission – to reduce poverty by raising household incomes. There they found a mixed picture that provides valuable feedback about what worked in the field and what didn’t.  It’s the kind of evaluation that rarely gets done in the risk adverse environment of Washington, and it’s one to be appreciated, given the MCC’s commitment to learning and incorporating the insights from their evaluations.

While impact evaluations have been carried out in other policy areas like labor and education, they’re much rarer in foreign policy.  In part, that’s because they rely upon adapting the experimental method where you measure results by comparing one group that receives treatment with another that doesn’t.  In the dynamic world of foreign policy, you rarely have the opportunity to make such decisions because, more often than not, you’re putting out fires.  In global development, ethical questions have been about how to do this because it would mean choosing who would receive, say, life-saving health treatments or education and who wouldn’t so that you’d have a control group to compare with.  Inspired in part by research by MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (and their book, Poor Economics), new methods have been developed that take into account these challenges and offer a real chance to see what works and what doesn’t.

The MCC’s five impact evaluations (all conducted by independent external evaluators) were done for a small slice of their overall portfolio, for farmer training activities in five countries — Armenia, El Salvador, Ghana, Honduras, and Nicaragua for programs were designed between 2004 and 2005 and implemented between 2005 and 2012.  In the design of these compacts with partner countries, they measured inputs and outputs (such as farmers trained), as well as interim outcomes (such as farmers using new techniques learned through training) and the growth of farmer incomes and household incomes more broadly.

On the measure of inputs and outputs, the MCC’s farmer training programs performed very well, meeting or exceeding their performance targets.  And they also found increases in farm income in some countries (in El Salvador, dairy farmers doubled their farm incomes) and in some regions in some countries (in northern Ghana, farmers’ annual crop income increased, while southern and central Ghana showed no impacts on farm income from the compacts’ farmer training activities).  In others (such as Honduras), they weren’t able to make measurements due to problems in compact implementation.

But did they affect the MCC’s long-term goal of improving household income and reducing poverty?  The independent evaluations scrupulously admit that they don’t know.  In some countries household income has risen during the compact period, but it’s difficult to attribute that growth to the program.  Why?  The evaluations have highlighted that some of the traditional methods of farming training may not work as well as assumed.  Training is often accompanied by starter kits, a package of seeds, fertilizer and equipment, to complement the training with the idea that it will give the farmers materials to apply what they’ve learned.  It turns out that sometimes that works, but some of the starter kits contained materials that weren’t useful.

Changing the content of starter kits is a relatively easy issue to fix, but, to their credit, they asked the harder questions of why they weren’t seeing the results they expected in some cases, given that they met their program targets.  When the MCC compared results across settings, they found that it may not always be effective to provide a little training to a lot of people, one of the more common impulses in situations of need.  Rather, training fewer farmers more intensively may produce better results because it ensures that the training actually takes hold and adapts to local conditions.  They also may need to adopt a longer time horizon – beyond the short term crop cycle to see whether and how training translates into higher incomes.  For the MCC, this will mean going back to re-assess their training programs in Burkina Faso and Moldova, as well as look for broader implications for their models of impact.  It will be challenging, given the time pressures to complete a compact in five years.  It may mean re-evaluating initial assumptions in future compacts.

The five impact evaluations are for just 2% of the overall MCC budget, so they’re just a start but they offer an initial glimpse into both the effectiveness of these programs and real efforts by the agency to take measuring results seriously.  They take the tough step of assessing assumptions – in this case, that farmer training really leads to higher farmer income and overall household income.  The MCC has been a leader in this effort to do rigorous evaluation, one that has supporters in other agencies (such as USAID, which has also committed to releasing evaluations of its programs as part of its evaluation policy).  It’s a good moment at both the policy and the political level, and the kind of commitment to transparency that should make friends on the Hill and in the development community.

November 13, 2012 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs David Beckmann, George Ingram and Jim Kolbe:

MFAN wishes to congratulate President Barack Obama, as well as returning and new Members of Congress, for their victories in the 2012 elections. With regard to U.S. development and foreign assistance efforts, this is an important moment to look back at the accomplishments of the last four years and ahead to the clear opportunities of the coming term.

During President Obama’s first term in office, we saw significant progress made in elevating, reforming, and reshaping U.S. development programs. The President built on efforts by the Bush Administration to create a new model for U.S. foreign assistance, taking them a step further by releasing the first-ever Presidential Policy Directive on Development (PPD). The PPD established a roadmap for transforming our development programs with a greater focus on country-led approaches, monitoring and evaluation, transparency and accountability, and more efficient partnerships and coordination between the public and private sectors. To execute this vision effectively, the President supported a landmark internal reform process to revitalize the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and launched innovative new programs like Feed the Future and the Partnership for Growth. We applaud the President, his staff, and other key players from the Administration and Congress for having the courage to push these reforms.

The next four years offer the opportunity to solidify gains and drive additional progress. MFAN will focus specifically on four key areas, which will be discussed in more detail in a forthcoming set of transition recommendations:

• Institutionalizing reform by working with Congress to pass key legislation, like the Foreign Assistance Transparency and Accountability Act, which enjoys support from Democrats and Republicans in both chambers.

• Strengthening U.S. leadership in global development by producing an overarching global development strategy.

• Improving transparency and accountability by ensuring that relevant agencies follow OMB guidelines and submit information to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), and that such information is cross-posted to the ForeignAssistance.gov dashboard.

• Transitioning from aid to development cooperation by rethinking our relationship with middle-income and other countries where non-aid tools, such as trade and investment, can have a stronger impact.

These are big and ambitious undertakings but we believe they are realistic and achievable. We are particularly optimistic of success because of what we heard on the 2012 campaign trail. Both President Obama and Governor Romney spoke publicly about the importance of U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty, drive economic growth, and eradicate disease in developing countries. We hope that policymakers in both parties will agree that our ability to maintain our leadership and leverage on a changing world stage, and turn the unprecedented development gains of the past decade into lasting change, will rest heavily on how well we use non-military tools of foreign policy like development and diplomacy.

We look forward to working with our MFAN partners, the Obama Administration, and the next generation of development leadership in Congress to continue reforming U.S. foreign assistance to make it more effective and accountable.

January 2, 2013 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs David Beckmann, George Ingram and Jim Kolbe:

We strongly applaud the House of Representatives for passing the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act (H.R. 3159). We commend the bill’s lead author Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) and thank the 56 Members of the House from both parties who signed on to support the legislation. We are also grateful to lead Senate sponsors Senators Richard Lugar (R-IN), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and John Kerry (D-MA) for pursuing the legislation in the Senate.

In order for this bill to become law, the Senate must act before the end of the 112th Congress.  We urge them to pass the bill immediately, and send it to the President for his signature.

This landmark bill would vastly enhance the openness, effectiveness, and accountability of U.S. taxpayer-funded development programs. The American people deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent overseas and what they are achieving.  We urge the Senate to act now.

January 4, 2012 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs David Beckmann, George Ingram and Jim Kolbe:

We are disappointed that one Senator’s objection earlier this week killed the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act (H.R. 3159), which had been scheduled for passage by unanimous consent after the House approved it without objection last week.

Because the bill came so close to becoming law, we are optimistic about its prospects in the 113th Congress and we plan to redouble our efforts to support its passage.  We remain grateful for Texas Rep. Ted Poe’s leadership in introducing the bill, and for the support of original co-sponsor Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) and 55 other Members of the House who endorsed the legislation. We also applaud Senators Richard Lugar (R-IN), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and John Kerry (D-MA) for shepherding the bill in the Senate. Finally, we thank our MFAN partner organizations for the hard work they did in pushing for the legislation’s passage.

The Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act would have an unmistakably positive impact on the effectiveness and accountability of our foreign assistance. It would institute a more uniform approach to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) across all of our assistance programs, while also updating and expanding the Foreign Assistance Dashboard public information website. Equally as important, it would foster more consistent and comprehensive interaction between the Administration and Congress on development issues.

The American people deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent and what they are achieving, and our international partners and foreign assistance recipients themselves need clearer and more consistent information in order to strengthen the impact of programs on the ground. We look forward to working with the 113th Congress on these issues, and we hope the Obama Administration will show its support for the legislation as well.

During his time as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator John Kerry (D-MA) became a vocal proponent for effective foreign assistance. As his confirmation hearing to become the next Secretary of State gets underway, we wanted to take a moment to look back on some supportive statements made by Chairman Kerry over the last four years. We hope that Kerry will continue to hold onto his support for foreign assistance and the International Affairs account and look forward to seeing what his leadership may bring for U.S. development efforts.

The following are excerpts from a speech made by Senator Kerry titled “Diplomacy and Development in the 21^st Century” delivered at the Brookings Institution on May 21, 2009:

• “So these realities really do present a brave new world for which we have to dramatically redesign our foreign policy. If we are to meet these challenges, this much is clear: development and diplomacy have to retake their rightful place alongside defense at the heart of American’s foreign policy. And yet today, for all of our past successes, there’s a growing realization that our diplomatic and development capacities are simply not prepared for the task ahead. And when you consider our meager investment in it, it’s easy to understand why.”
• “We need to clarify the policies and the goals of our foreign assistance. There is no overarching policy for U.S. foreign aid today or for development today.”
• “Second, we need to bring greater coordination to those aid efforts. We have over 20 agencies implementing a slew of aid programs, often with very diffused and even conflicting goals.”
• “Third, we must strengthen our professional expertise in capacity and the delivery of aid. The need has never been greater to train and cultivate a generation of highly skilled public servants.”
• “To attract top talent, we need to promote a results-based culture of accountability in transparency and we need to restore intellectual capacity in policy and strategic planning to ensure that USAID is a place where innovative ideas can take shape and take hold.”
• “Fourth; we need to streamline outdated laws and heavy bureaucracy in order to untie the hands of workers. The last time the United States Senate authorized the Foreign Assistance Act was the year I arrived in the Senate in 1985. That Bill runs over 400 pages long and is full of confusing directives, reporting requirements, and procedural roadblocks.”
• “We need to empower country teams to shape programs, to determine needs, and even take calculated risks if they see a real strategic opportunity.”
• “We need cutting edge programs that push the envelope on ending global poverty and other problems and our development agencies ought to be leading the charge in that effort.”
• “To that end, we are going to support efforts in legislation to promote the accountability to enhance transparency, to track performance with benchmarks or otherwise, and to distill the lessons that have been learned in a more comprehensive institutionalized way so that it’s not haphazard when you’re recommitting the next error and suddenly someone comes in and you say oh, God, we’ve got to look at what we did.”

The following quote is from Chairman Kerry on the release of President Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development (PPD-6) in September, 2010:

• “I am pleased to join with the President in support of a new development vision to address the leading moral, strategic and economic challenges of the 21^st century.  The President has outlined a comprehensive development policy based on measurable outcomes, country ownership, sustainable economic growth and multilateralism – a policy that will build capacity in the developing world, not dependence.”

The following quote by Chairman Kerry comes from a committee statement on the introduction of the Foreign Assistance Revitalization and Accountability Act, of which Kerry was a lead author:

• “I believe this legislation will go a long way toward improving our immediate ability to deliver foreign aid in a more accountable, thoughtful and strategic manner. We need cutting edge programs that will push the envelope on ending chronic poverty, combating global climate change, reducing hunger, supporting democracies, and offering alternatives to extremism.” “We need cutting edge programs that will push the envelope on ending chronic poverty, combating global climate change, reducing hunger, supporting democracies, and offering alternatives to extremism.”

The following are excerpts from a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on the Foreign Assistance Revitalization and Accountability Act:

• “A viable whole-of-government approach demands a lead actor who is able to tap into a wide range of capabilities and expertise, but ultimately has the authority to make final decisions about programs, resources, and implementation objectives. The committee believes a more optimal way to ensure whole-of-government expertise while providing for proper coherence and coordination is to consider a ‘centers of excellence’’ approach, which would house specialized capabilities and resources focused on a discrete set of objectives in a specific institution.”
• “Streamlining, flexibility and prioritization are essential so that agencies know where to focus resources and efforts. The committee believes that streamlining procurement rules, earmarks and restrictions is equally important in order to allow greater discretion and authority for civilian agency leaders.”
• “Country teams should have a much greater role in determining programmatic and funding priorities in partnership with local actors.”
• “Development requires better coherence, stronger inter-agency coordination and improved rationalization to determine which agencies will undertake different foreign aid programs. The U.S. needs to provide a unified development voice to demonstrate our commitment to development issues, fighting poverty and hunger and engaging with the world.”
• “…It is increasingly important that we have the means to evaluate and measure cases of development successes and failures, and to better understand what programs work, which do not, and what are the conditions that determine effectiveness.”
• “Finding a way to better integrate evaluation with innovation and program design would improve the effectiveness, impact, scope and creativity of our development efforts.”
• “In order to best achieve foreign assistance objectives, maximize the resources of the United States Government, ensure programming coherence, avoid duplication and fragmentation, and enhance an effective whole-of-government approach, direct responsibility for coordinating all development and humanitarian efforts of the United States Government in a country shall reside with the USAID mission director, under the overall direction of the chief of mission.”
• “The committee strongly feels that U.S. citizens and recipients of U.S. foreign assistance should, to the maximum extent practicable, have full access to information on U.S. foreign assistance and development programs.”

February 19, 2013 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs David Beckmann, George Ingram and Jim Kolbe:

The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network is intrigued by reports that the Obama Administration may propose changes to the U.S. approach to providing overseas food assistance, including reforms that could make this assistance more cost effective and allow us to reach more people around the world in need of help.  While we don’t yet have details of these proposed changes, we believe strongly that improving the effectiveness and efficiency of U.S. food aid is long overdue and could provide millions more people with life-saving assistance—all without increasing the budget for these programs.

The current approach to delivering food aid is outdated and in need of reform.  In an era of decreasing budgets, policymakers simply can’t afford not to consider any credible proposal to maximize the impact of taxpayer dollars.  We urge the Administration to make its proposal public and include it in the Fiscal Year 2014 budget request, and we urge Congress to give it careful and complete consideration.

See below for a guest post from MFAN co-chair and Brookings senior fellow George Ingram on how the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and the Foreign Assistance Dashboard are the tools Congress has been looking for to prove the value of U.S. foreign assistance programs. This post originally appeared on the Brookings blog. 

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As the long-dreaded sequestration process begins to set in, U.S. government programs that have already been feeling the heat of budget pressures are now starting to feel the pinch. Across all agencies and departments, there has never been such heightened vigilance to determine the quality, value, and effectiveness of taxpayer-funded programs in order to save them from landing on the proverbial chopping block. U.S. foreign assistance is no exception, and in fact, is likely to be a popular target despite notable progress over the past decade in how aid is delivered.

One basic tool to help circumvent arbitrary and needless cuts is to make information related to foreign assistance transparent, accessible and comparable with the activities of other international donors. Congress has the important responsibility of choosing how much to allocate for activities that seek to lift millions out of extreme poverty, fight disease, spur growth and restore human dignity. In this challenging budget environment, that responsibility is of even higher consequence, with the potential to affect lives all around the world, either for the better or worse. But to make informed decisions, Congress needs to have at its disposal comprehensive, reliable data that is timely and up-to-date.

The Foreign Assistance Dashboard— a public website launched a little over two years ago by the Obama administration to examine this data— demonstrates a strong commitment to aid transparency. However, compliance from agencies involved in U.S. foreign assistance has been slow; the site still only has partial information (budget plans, obligations and expenditures) for a couple of agencies (USAID and Millennium Challenge Corporation) and just planning data for the State Department, leaving out more than a dozen others as well as critical program and project data that lie beneath the aid-flow surface.

The U.S. made another major commitment to the transparency agenda at the 2011 High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, by joining the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Meeting the IATI commitments, particularly the publication of comprehensive and timely foreign assistance information, is incomplete and moving slowly.

Congress needs to understand that the dashboard and IATI are the tools it has been searching for. Members continuously complain about the opaqueness of foreign assistance – how much assistance is the U.S. providing, to what countries, for what purposes, in cooperation with whom, to what effect? Where is the information to explain to constituents how their tax dollars are being spent? Together the dashboard and IATI will provide this information.

Even more importantly, while there are varying opinions over the best uses and purposes for foreign assistance, members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, are united in caring that foreign assistance dollars are used well – that tax dollars are not wasted and that the assistance does help lift individuals and countries from poverty and promote U.S. foreign policy interests.

IATI is a critical tool in contributing to the effective use of foreign assistance funds – and not just government provided assistance, but also that which is provided by private entities such as NGOs, foundations and corporations. It is currently the only place for comparable aid information. While the dashboard is a valuable domestic resource, IATI allows a wide range of stakeholders to know what the U.S. government is doing alongside what others are doing. This is the full aid picture and what recipients want to know on the ground.

As of April 2013, 39 government and multilateral donors, and over 100 private organizations, have committed to IATI. When fully operative and with timely and comprehensive data from all donors, we will have the ability through one website to find all donor activity in a particular sector and a particular locale in a country – a virtual one-stop-data-shop for foreign assistance. So how will this improve aid effectiveness?

Let’s say you are: (1) USAID contemplating investing scarce assistance funds in education in region X of country Y; (2) a congressional staffer whose boss has asked whether donors are helping to expand education opportunities in that region; (3) an NGO contemplating working in that region; (4) a finance ministry budget expert in country Y trying to figure out which school districts are in the greatest need of resources in the next fiscal year. IATI will provide the data to help answer these questions.

Through IATI, USAID will know which other donors are engaged in the region, at what level of funding, with what specific focus, and with whom it might coordinate. The congressional staffer can tell his member what donors and at what level education is being assisted. The NGO can tell if this region is overrun by its sister organizations or ignored and with whom it might partner. The ministry budget expert can better allocate scarce resources and query the education ministry staff as to whether it is integrating donor activity into national education plans.

The administration is to be commended for taking the leading in bringing U.S. assistance into the age of data transparency. It is now time for Congress to become involved, by supporting the administration but also by pushing for more robust implementation. Congressman Ted Poe does this in his bill, the “Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act”, which passed the House in the waning days of the last Congress but was held up in the Senate. It is expected that he will soon reintroduce the bill. Congress should act swiftly to enact it into law and recommend that IATI be the standard by which all agencies in the aid space publish their data.

May 10, 2013 (Washington, DC)- American Jewish World Service, Bread for the World, CARE, The Modernizing Assistance Network, Oxfam America and Save the Children released the following statement today in advance of the Senate and House committee mark-ups of the 2013 Farm Bill:

With more than 870 million people suffering from hunger worldwide and Congress looking to ensure wise use of taxpayer funds at home, the 2013 Farm Bill represents a crucial opportunity to make our international food aid programs both more efficient and more cost-effective.

Unfortunately, the current Senate draft Farm Bill, due to be marked up this week, includes the same incremental steps toward reform as last year, but fails to address the fundamental changes that are so badly needed. We urge Senate leaders to work with the Administration to achieve stronger reforms in food aid programs so that American tax dollars can go farther and American compassion can reach more people in need. On the House side, we remain disappointed that the House Agriculture Committee draft once again fails to incorporate any reforms.

In his 2014 budget request, President Obama proposed common sense reforms that would feed millions more people and save lives by delivering aid faster with no additional cost to the taxpayer. This proposal sets an important precedent in building a more modern food aid program. Proposed reforms include allowing for greater flexibility in how the U.S. delivers food to hungry people overseas and ending the inefficient method of having aid groups sell food aid overseas to fund development programs, a practice known as “monetization.” This increased flexibility is a part of a package that would allow food aid to go farther, feeding 2-4 million additional people. These reforms have been greeted with interest by members on both sides of the aisle.

While we are supporting the Administration’s request that the FY 14 Appropriations bills be the vehicle for food aid reform, we recognize that there are several potential paths forward for Congress to achieve these much needed improvements to our international food aid program, and we are fully committed to working with leaders in Congress, including members of the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committees, to get it done this year.

Partisanship in Washington seems to be at an all-time (and ever escalating) high these days. But when it comes to international development, there is a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum that it is something the U.S. must do and do well. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have taken important steps toward reforming U.S. development policy and practice. The establishment of the Millennium Challenge Corporation by President Bush, with strong bipartisan support from Congress, paved the way for other important reforms by the Obama Administration including the first-ever Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development and the USAID Forward agenda.

In 2011, MFAN released From Policy to Practice—a set of reform principles to help guide U.S. development policy. The principles include modernizing legislation, incorporating local priorities, and strengthening and empowering USAID. In the two years since the release of From Policy to Practice, we have seen the Obama Administration and Congress make strides and the development community rally behind the importance of reform. But there is still more work to be done, and at a time when budgets are shrinking, finding more effective and efficient approaches to solving development challenges is something everyone can get behind.

Today, the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition released their second Report on Reports, which analyzes over 30 reports, including MFAN’s From Policy to Practice, from across the political spectrum. Despite analyzing a diverse range of work from groups like the left-leaning Center for American Progress and the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, USGLC finds there’s more of a consensus on U.S. development policy than we might expect. The Report on Reports highlights six key areas of agreement, including ensuring results-driven development, improving coordination, and maintaining sufficient resources, that many groups in the development community are highlighting as priority areas for improving U.S. policy.

The elevation of development alongside diplomacy and defense, the continuing implementation of the USAID Forward agenda, the introduction of legislation like Rep. Gerry Connolly’s (D-VA) Global Partnerships Act and Rep. Ted Poe’s (R-TX) Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act, and President Obama’s proposal to reform U.S. food aid are all positive signs that the reform agenda is making headway. However, the Administration and Congress must work together to institutionalize these important reforms so that progress is not lost as political winds shift in Washington.

Click here to see USGLC’s helpful infographic on the road to a “smart power” approach to national security issues.

See below for a new op-ed from MFAN’s Co-Chairs: Rev. David Beckmann, Jim Kolbe, and George Ingram. This piece originally ran in Roll Call.

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Something peculiar has happened around President Barack Obama’s trip to Africa: a famously dysfunctional Congress actually sent a constructive, bipartisan message to the president about the future of engagement with the continent and other developing countries.

Two weeks ago, a group of Republicans and Democrats led by House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., ranking member Eliot L. Engel, D-N.Y., and Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, sent a letter to the Obama administration calling for more aggressive efforts to bolster foreign assistance transparency. In the letter, they argued that transparency provides “the critical information needed to achieve better coordination with other donors, avoid duplication and waste, and provide Congress the means to oversee” U.S. foreign assistance programs. Then last week, an amendment to the House farm bill authored again by Royce and Engel, which would have overhauled the U.S. food aid system to purchase more resources locally and build greater self-sufficiency in poor countries, came within a surprising inch of passing. And, thanks to the leadership of Poe and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., bipartisan, bicameral legislation will soon be introduced to require greater transparency and accountability in foreign assistance.

The Congress is overdue in its focus on foreign assistance reform, which the Obama administration has admirably invested in to build on efforts by the administration of George W. Bush. But a late start is better than no start at all, and progress is there for the taking. Transparency and local self-sufficiency and ownership are the most important elements of reform to advance.

Transparency is the touchstone of effective development. In bilateral and multilateral collaboration, it is a critical component for maintaining trust between partners and a clear focus on results and accountability. Even more importantly, it is the bridge between development programs and the citizens those programs purport to empower. Fortunately, in 2011 the Obama administration took a number of important steps to strengthen transparency by joining the International Aid Transparency Initiative and the Open Government Partnership. The administration also introduced the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, which has finally begun to streamline data and centralize information across all U.S. agencies involved in aid, though more compliance is needed. The U.S. Agency for International Development has played a key role as well. The agency recently completed an unprecedented analysis of U.S. aid through 186 in-depth evaluations to develop the proper metrics for measuring the effects of assistance.

In Africa, Obama can tout these improvements to show that the U.S. is committed to being a better development partner. At the same time, the president would be wise to urge African leaders to make greater commitments of their own to transparency and accountability. This is critically important for a continent that is just beginning to experience democracy and in a world where a lack of accountability is at the root of widespread discontent and upheaval.

Turning transparency into impact requires additional action in other areas, and one of the key pathways to effective development that has emerged is increasing local ownership of the development process, which leads to a greater sense of responsibility on the part of both governments and local civil society to deliver results and, over time, better results.

The Obama administration, through the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development of 2010, has made local ownership a core piece of its development agenda. In 2010, only 9.7 percent of USAID funding directed in missions was awarded to local institutions. Today, that number is 14.3 percent and the goal is to increase local awards to 30 percent of outlays by 2015.

Local ownership is critical, but host countries must also contribute greater resources from their own budgets. A recent report by Oxfam and Development Finance International found that developing countries are on track to miss every domestic spending target of the Millennium Development Goals. The global economic crisis is partly to blame as it led to revenue losses of $140 billion in poor countries. However, in 2012, developing countries will only be spending 0.5 percent of gross domestic product more than in 2008 and much of it is because of expensive borrowing. There are some bright spots, including Ethiopia’s decision earlier this week to allocate $38 million from its treasury to support nutrition programs. Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that in 13 countries more people are newly receiving treatment than are newly infected from HIV and AIDS. However, he also cautioned that in order for progress on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to continue, host countries will have to assume more responsibility, as the model shifts “from merely providing aid to co-investing in host countries’ capacity.”

The true opportunity at hand is for Obama to provide concrete evidence to Africans and citizens of other developing countries that the U.S. is invested in their well-being as a partner, not a patron, as he has said in the past. At the same time, he can send a strong signal to multilateral partners and the American public that accountability and results from both donor and recipient countries are at the core of the U.S. development enterprise.

The president should rightly highlight during his trip to Africa a decade’s worth of global progress on development, with millions more being lifted out of the depths of extreme poverty, so much so that the World Bank has set a target of ending extreme poverty by 2030. But he should also focus his remarks on reform, transparency and local ownership, where on the home front, he can make good on those commitments by working with Congress to pass sensible reform legislation, including the bill to-be-introduced by Poe and Rubio.

The Rev. David Beckmann, a 2010 World Food Prize laureate, is the president of Bread for the World. George Ingram is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Jim Kolbe, a former Republican congressman from Arizona, is a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a senior adviser at McLarty Associates. They are co-chairmen of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network.

July 10, 2013 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs David Beckmann, George Ingram and Jim Kolbe:

MFAN applauds Congressmen Ted Poe (R-TX) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) for introducing the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2013 (H.R. 2638; S. 1271). An earlier version of the bill received an encouraging response upon its initial introduction during the 112th Congress, where it sailed through the House with a unanimous vote of 390-0.

The bipartisan legislation would strengthen U.S. development programs that are critical levers of influence in an increasingly complex world by directing U.S. agencies involved in foreign assistance to employ more coherent, consistent, and transparent monitoring and evaluation.

This builds on work the Obama Administration has done to embed results-oriented learning practices in U.S. development programming, including new evaluation policies at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of State, as well as a new U.S. commitment to participate in the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Specifically, the bills would improve accountability, transparency, and overall effectiveness first by requiring the President to establish uniform interagency guidelines—with measurable goals, performance metrics, and monitoring and evaluation plans—across all U.S. foreign assistance programs. In addition, H.R. 2638 / S.1271 would require the President to maintain and expand the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, a public website with detailed information regarding U.S. foreign assistance on a program-by-program and country-by-country basis. The site, which is currently populated by only five U.S. government departments or agencies, would be updated quarterly by all agencies that administer foreign assistance, and would allow American taxpayers and partner countries the ability to access and track comprehensive, timely, and comparable data.

The Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act is an important step toward making lasting, statutory reforms that will ensure U.S. foreign assistance programs are more transparent, accountable, and effective.  We look forward to working with Members of both the House and Senate to enact this legislation during the 113th Congress.

This week, a bicameral, bipartisan piece of legislation was introduced to strengthen transparency and evaluation of U.S. foreign assistance. The bill, the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2013 (H.R. 2638; S. 1271), was introduced by Reps. Ted Poe (R-TX) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ben Cardin (D-MD). An earlier version of the legislation was introduced last year and passed the House with a unanimous vote of 390-0. The legislation establishes uniform interagency guidelines – with measurable goals, performance metrics, and monitoring and evaluation plans and also requires the President to maintain and expand the Foreign Assistance Dashboard.

MFAN is pleased to see that the legislation has been reintroduced with bipartisan backing in both the House and Senate as well as strong support from the NGO community. Brookings and Oxfam put out blog posts applauding the bill’s introduction, and in addition to MFAN’s statement, below you will find additional statements of support from MFAN partners.

• “We thank Reps. Poe and Connolly and Sens. Rubio and Cardin for introducing this important bipartisan legislation that will enact common-sense reforms to improve U.S. foreign assistance programs. We appreciate their hard work and dedication to reforming and improving foreign assistance through greater transparency and accountability measures. Ultimately, these reforms will empower us to better serve the world’s poor, as well as American taxpayers.” – Samuel A. Worthington, President & CEO, InterAction
•  “It took great bipartisan effort to move this bill forward and we hope it sets a constructive precedent for further reform. When people in developing countries know what the US is doing in their communities, they can take action themselves to amplify the results. And when the US government has better information and tools for measuring the impact of our programs, we can help make sure they are delivering better results for America and our partners.” – Gregory Adams, Director of Aid Effectiveness, Oxfam America
•  “This bill is an important step toward increasing the transparency, accountability and impact of foreign aid. With upwards from 22 agencies currently implementing U.S. foreign assistance, the bill aims to streamline and clarify how programs across federal agencies deliver aid.” – Andrea Koppel, Vice President of Global Engagement and Policy, Mercy Corps
•  “This legislation demonstrates a real desire in Congress to make our foreign assistance programs, which are saving millions of lives around the world, even better by making them more effective, efficient and transparent. We look forward to working with Members of both chambers to enact this legislation during the 113th Congress.” – Tom Hart, U.S. Executive Director, ONE
•  “The USGLC commends Congressmen Poe and Connolly and Senators Rubio and Cardin for their leadership on this bipartisan legislation to further enhance the accountability and effectiveness of foreign assistance programs.  In addition to ensuring ample funding and resources for development and diplomacy, it’s vital that we ensure the highest standards for transparency and results.” – Liz Schrayer, Executive Director, USGLC

Melissa Kaplan, advocacy manager for aid reform at InterAction, wrote about the recently introduced Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act in an op-ed in CQ. See an excerpt of the piece below.

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“The world we live in today is more tightly interconnected than it has ever been. It’s not a question of whether foreign assistance is necessary, but rather how we can best utilize this important tool to reduce extreme poverty as a prominent signal of America’s moral leadership. President Barack Obama recently completed a high-profile trip to Africa — a continent that has suffered greatly from war, poverty and disease but also a place where U.S. foreign assistance has had a real and positive impact through programs such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (an HIV and AIDs initiative that has provided anti-retroviral treatment, care and other support to millions around the world). At less than 1 percent of the federal budget, foreign assistance represents a tiny sliver of U.S. spending, but the dollars invested in the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development can do an enormous amount of good even on a relative shoestring.”

“Many problems facing Congress today seem intractable, and our legislative branch is often stymied by partisan rancor that prevents the implementation of much-needed solutions to pressing problems. The Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act represents a chance to break through this logjam and enact common-sense legislation that will enable our foreign assistance programs to work better. It’s no wonder that this legislation has drawn such strong bipartisan support among those who believe in the good foreign assistance can do, and want to see that it’s carried out as effectively as possible. Despite its unanimous approval by the House of Representatives, time ran out last Congress before the Senate had a chance to vote on FATA. Now that it has been reintroduced, with additional, stronger language on monitoring and evaluation, I am confident that it can and will pass in both chambers this year.”

July 26, 2013 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs David Beckmann, George Ingram and Jim Kolbe:

We are greatly concerned that a decade’s worth of measurable progress on foreign assistance – marked by millions of lives saved, landmark systemic reforms, and bold programmatic innovation – is at risk in the current FY2014 appropriations processes underway in Congress. While the Senate Appropriations Committee proposal for funding international affairs protects the core of programs considered vital to our national security and foreign policy, the House Appropriations Committee has adopted a proposal that would drastically reduce funding for these same programs and reorder priorities in a way that would severely undercut U.S. global leadership on development. This is unwise at a time when our diplomatic and development programs are key levers of influence amidst turmoil in the Middle East and elsewhere around the globe.

Specifically, the FY2014 spending bills released by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees are nearly $10 billion apart on funding for U.S. global health and development programs.  The spending plan for State and Foreign Operations (SFOPS) approved Wednesday by the House Appropriations Committee includes huge and strategically damaging cuts. Multilateral assistance, which is a cornerstone of our cooperative engagement with allies to build self-sufficiency and ownership in developing countries, would be cut 61 percent. Our international disaster assistance, which is the lynchpin of the global response to unforeseen humanitarian crises, would drop 40 percent. Our development assistance, which funds programs that are successfully helping the world’s most vulnerable people overcome debilitating poverty and deadly diseases, would be slashed 26 percent.

In addition to the gutting of overall foreign assistance programs, the House budget contains substantial, ill-advised cuts to the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Operating Expenses budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The MCC, a bipartisan effort launched under President George W. Bush, has embodied many of the reform principles we are now seeing take hold across government as part of President Obama’s first-ever U.S. Global Development Policy, including a clear focus on broad-based economic growth achieved through country-led plans, evaluation of results, transparency, and policy reforms in partner governments. Meanwhile, Operating Expenses at USAID are supporting an agency-wide reform effort that has restored much-needed accountability, expertise, and capacity after years of steady decline.

Taken together and if passed, these cuts would represent a nearly full repudiation of the idea that the U.S. must lead the world on development. In contrast, the Senate’s FY2014 proposal for State and Foreign Operations maintains essential funding for USAID’s Operating Expenses and the MCC, as well as funding for international organizations—such as UNICEF and the World Health Organization—where the U.S. exercises a key leadership role.

Encouragingly, both Chambers have addressed initiatives to encourage more local procurement and we look forward to working with Congress to ensure that USAID and other agencies are given the flexibility they need to work through local partners in order to maximize development effectiveness and build sustainable local capacity.

As the appropriations process moves forward, we urge Congress to follow the Senate’s lead to maintain these smart investments in our nation’s security, prosperity, and leadership around the world.

November 14, 2013 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs George Ingram, Carolyn Miles, and Connie Veillette

MFAN applauds the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for unanimously approving the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2013 (S. 1271) introduced by Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ben Cardin (D-MD). This bipartisan legislation would strengthen U.S. development programs in an era of constrained budget resources by directing U.S. agencies involved in foreign assistance to focus on more coherent, consistent, and transparent monitoring and evaluation to ensure that we get the most out of every dollar we spend on foreign assistance.

While the Obama Administration has emphasized its commitment to greater transparency and efficiency, as is evidenced in efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of State to implement new evaluation policies, as well as by the U.S. committing to participate in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), there is still more work to be done. In the recently released 2013 Aid Transparency Index (ATI) by Publish What You Fund, the Millennium Challenge Corporation was ranked as the most transparent donor among the 67 global donors assessed; however, other U.S. agencies did not fare as well. Most notably, the Department of State and PEPFAR were ranked 40th and 50th respectively, falling into the ATI’s “Poor” and “Very Poor” categories.

The legislation would improve accountability, transparency, and overall effectiveness first by requiring the President to establish uniform interagency guidelines—with measurable goals, performance metrics, and monitoring and evaluation plans—across all U.S. foreign assistance programs.  The bill would require that comprehensive, timely, and comparable data on all U.S. foreign assistance be made publicly available on the Foreign Assistance Dashboard. This would reinforce the good intentions of the Obama Administration, but also drive broader compliance from agencies and departments, as only six to date have posted information to the Dashboard since its launch in 2010. In addition, it would hold the Administration to account on its own existing policies, requiring that the uniform guidance be inclusive of security sector assistance as defined by the Security Sector Assistance (SSA) Presidential Policy Directive (PPD-23).

An earlier version of the legislation was introduced in the 112th Congress where it received an encouraging response. The bill was unanimously passed by the House with a vote of 390-0, and was unanimously approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but did not receive floor consideration before the session came to a close.

MFAN is strongly supportive of the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2013 (S. 1271) as an important step forward to codifying reforms that will ensure U.S. foreign assistance programs are more transparent, accountable, and effective and we commend Sens. Rubio and Cardin for their leadership on this issue. However, we feel the legislation must be rigorously applied to all foreign assistance programs, including those defined as security sector assistance by PPD-23. MFAN would also like to see the legislation track more closely with the commitment made by the U.S. to IATI, which would include publishing data on a quarterly basis, rather than a semi-annual basis as the bill currently prescribes.

This week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took an important step towards strengthening U.S. development programs by unanimously passing the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2013 (S. 1271). This bipartisan legislation introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) would improve accountability, transparency, and overall effectiveness by requiring the President to establish uniform interagency guidelines—with measurable goals, performance metrics, and monitoring and evaluation plans—across all U.S. foreign assistance programs.

This move to advance the legislation in the Senate was met with broad support from across the development community. In addition to MFAN’s statement, found here, below you will find excerpts from supportive statements from our partners:

• “This legislation goes a long way to strengthen U.S. development programs despite recent efforts to cut spending and reduce the overall budget. Directing U.S. foreign assistance agencies to develop better and more transparent monitoring and evaluation systems will lead to better use of taxpayer dollars and ensure that we are getting the most return on our investments.” –  Tom Hart, U.S. Executive Director, ONE

• “The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s approval today of the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act is an important step for strengthening the accountability and effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance programs. The USGLC commends Senator Rubio and Senator Cardin – and House sponsors, Representatives Poe and Connolly — for their leadership on this bipartisan legislation. It builds on the important reforms being undertaken by USAID and those modeled by the Millennium Challenge Corporation to ensure the highest standards for transparency and results for international affairs programs.” – Liz Schrayer, Executive Director, U.S. Global Leadership Coalition

• “We thank Senators Rubio and Cardin for their leadership and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for its passage of this important, bipartisan legislation. It will enact common-sense reforms to improve transparency and accountability in U.S. foreign assistance programs. I look forward to the full Congress passing it.” – Samuel A. Worthington, President and CEO, InterAction

• “We are delighted that this landmark, bipartisan piece of aid transparency legislation passed unanimously through committee. Given its broad support, we hope that it moves forward so we can continue to improve the effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance.” – Rev. David Beckmann, President, Bread for the World

• “Congress should increase aid transparency and accountability and provide USAID and other agencies with the necessary acquisition and other resources to effectively plan, award and oversee development implementation by international development companies. Advancing this bill—and the companion House bill—should strengthen the federal agencies’ efforts in transparency and accountability.” – Stan Soloway, President and CEO, Professional Services Council

See below for excerpts from an op-ed by Albert Kan-Dapaah, co-founder and executive director of Financial Accountability & Transparency-Africa and former Ghanaian minister and parliamentarian. This piece originally appeared in the Hill’s Congress blog.

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“Civil society in recipient countries must fight for accountability and transparency of poverty reducing aid in their respective countries, but we can’t do that without timely and comprehensive data on where U.S. aid dollars are going in their country.”

“Some donor agencies, including USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, do provide much needed information and data.  Unfortunately the publicly available information, in most cases, is not detailed enough nor released in a timely enough manner to be relevant for citizens in Ghana. And for civil society activists, like myself, in order to do our work to ensure foreign aid transparency and accountability, that information is power.  And such information is not always readily available within our own governments—indeed most times we are denied access to such data, making the data released by donors agencies the only information available to us.”

“Informed citizens, both here in the U.S. and in developing countries, can hold their government accountable on how foreign aid funds are spent. Organizing and providing data to meet the needs of civil society activists in their quest to monitor, evaluate and pronounce on the effective use of foreign assistance is key.”

See below for a guest post from George Ingram, senior fellow at Brookings and MFAN co-chair. Ingram writes about how current reform proposals to international food aid can increase flexibility in emergency situations. The original post can be found on Brookings’ Up Front blog.

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On November 7, Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan hit the Philippines, affecting 9.7 million people, displacing 3 million, killing 3,637, and destroying 384,000 acres of rice, corn and other crops worth $105 million.

Congress, through the House/Senate farm bill conference, once again has the opportunity to provide the U.S. international food aid program the flexibility that is essential for our help to be effective in responding to life-threatening disasters.

Look at how the U.S. has responded in the days following the devastation by Yolanda/Haiyan. USAID’s Office of Food for Peace committed $7.75 million from the International Disaster Assistance account to the World Food Program to purchase food in the Philippines and neighboring countries. Fifty-five tons of nutritious emergency food products were airlifted from the U.S.  One thousand one hundred tons of rice, prepositioned in Sri Lanka for just such an emergency, is en route and should arrive around December 2nd. These limited actions ensure that the U.S. is able to provide immediate relief to those in dire need.

U.S. food assistance resources are restricted to the purchase of U.S. grown commodities that then have to be shipped across the ocean.  An expedited procurement of U.S. rice would arrive in the Philippines in late January or early February at the earliest. That is 10-12 weeks after the typhoon hit, which can help relieve medium-term food needs, but does nothing to address the hunger and starvation in the days and weeks immediately following the destruction and devastation.

And one might say the Philippines is lucky as the typhoon struck at the beginning of the U.S. fiscal year so resources are available; if such a disaster strikes in July or August, the limited cash is likely to have already been spent responding to earlier crises.

The United States is the number one responder to humanitarian crises around the world, and the 60-year old food assistance program is at the center of that capability. Food aid is an important tool of U.S. smart power. It reflects the humanitarian streak that runs through the American people and at the same time enhances our image and influence in the world, such as the overwhelming appreciation by the people of Indonesia for our helping in the recovery from the 2010 tsunami.

In certain circumstances, and for the medium term to relieve food shortages, shipping commodities from the U.S. makes sense. But not allowing the resources to be used to procure food in the nearest and most efficient market constrains U.S. responsiveness and does not reflect well on the generosity of the American people.

This crisis should not be wasted by allowing the United States food aid program to continue along lines that were relevant in the 1950s and 1960s but not in the 21st century. The U.S. government needs the flexibility to purchase food commodities in the most efficient market, which sometimes will be the U.S., sometimes the country affected, and sometimes neighboring countries.  This flexibility will allow more efficient use of U.S. taxpayer resources and better reflect American values. The reform of the program proposed by the Obama administration earlier this year would allow the same dollar value to reach 4 million additional people. That proposal lost on the House floor by only 17 votes. My guess is, if it were put to the House now, in light of Yolanda/Haiyan and the recent evidence that purchasing food locally is the only way to get food to those in need in Syria, the reform would pass.

The House/Senate conference on the farm bill should adopt not just the modest change of 20 percent flexibility found in the Senate bill, but allow up to 30-40 percent, or, even better, 50 percent of our food assistance to be used for local and regional purchase if that is the most efficient and readily available source.

Last week I was in North Carolina meeting with a farm organization representative and asked what the position of the organization and its members on the administration’s food aid reform proposal was. His response was that the issue was not high on their agenda but that farmers object to the notion of giving cash to corrupt governments. Not an unreasonable attitude. So I then asked what the response might be if they were told the cash did not go to governments (as it does not), but instead to the World Food Program and U.S. non-profit organizations (Mercy Corps and Catholic Relief Service) that have a long track record of effectively purchasing commodities on local and regional markets. He said, in that case, their response probably would be different.

Why has every other country moved to providing cash rather than home-grown commodities? For the simple reason of efficiency and responsiveness. One would think that the United States, seen around the world as the champion of free enterprise and market-based solutions, would see the logic in purchasing emergency commodities in the most efficient market available!

See below for a guest post from MFAN Principal John Norris, Executive Director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at the Center for American Progress. This piece originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

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Maersk Group is Denmark’s largest company, making up more than 15 percent of the country’s GDP. The shipping firm employs more than 121,000 people worldwide, operates in 130 countries, generated $59 billion in revenue last year, maintains a fleet of 600, and announced at the end of 2013 that its full-year net profits would be $3.5 billion, up from the previous forecast of $3.3 billion. Maersk has also proudly declared itself a good corporate citizen, stressing a theme of “constant care” with a dedication “to promot[ing] the health and safety of our employees and others in the industry and in the world around us.” The company is a member of the United Nations Global Compact, which encourages companies to embrace a set of core values in the areas of human rights, labor standards, and the environment. Indeed, in many ways Maersk prides itself as the face of Denmark’s modern economy: diversified, humane, and enlightened.

Why then is the company, through its U.S. subsidiaries, aggressively fighting common-sense reforms that would help deliver desperately needed food assistance to millions of hungry people everywhere from Syria to South Sudan?

The answer traces back to the ongoing battle in the United States to reform international food-assistance programs, a battle currently playing out in the debate over the farm bill. The United States has a proud tradition of delivering food to some of the world’s poorest people living under the most harrowing of conditions.

This food has sustained millions when their lives have hung in the balance. But the process of acquiring and delivering food aid is deeply flawed.

Currently, the vast majority of food for U.S. government relief and development programs is purchased in the United States and then shipped thousands of miles overseas, often at great cost. Such a system is great for the bottom line of large shippers, like Maersk, but not for people in need or for taxpayers. In cases where U.S. food aid is “monetized” by humanitarian organizations receiving U.S. commodities, the sales of U.S. crops can depress prices in local food markets, making it harder for local farmers to flourish and for poor countries to end their dependence on aid. That is why most other major donors, including the World Food Program, procure food through local and regional systems, recognizing that it is more cost-effective, more efficient, and more sustainable to buy food closer to where it is needed.

Just how inefficient is the U.S. system, which was created decades ago to help find a way to dispose of government-held stocks of agricultural commodities? More than half of every dollar spent on U.S. food programs currently goes to shipping and transportation costs, rather than to lifesaving food, which means that a great deal of that money is ending up in coffers of companies like Maersk. The obvious waste inherent in such a system has only become more and more apparent with rising fuel costs over the last decade.

To correct this problem, Congress is currently considering reforms as part of the farm bill that would make food aid more flexible and efficient by purchasing a higher percentage of food closer to where it is actually needed. The reform proposals have generated significant bipartisan support, and a range of humanitarian groups, including Oxfam, Care, and Save the Children, have spoken out strongly on their behalf. It is no wonder: Experts at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) indicate that they could feed an additional 4 million people annually with the savings from these reforms. Other outside analysts have put the number as high as 10 million people.

Yet Maersk, along with U.S. maritime and agricultural unions, has mounted a ferocious attack on the reforms, with Maersk’s U.S. subsidiary often cloaking its concerns in naked economic terms. For instance, a group of companies and unions has said, “Growing, manufacturing, bagging, shipping, and transporting nutritious U.S. food creates jobs and economic activity here at home” and has made wild, unsubstantiated claims that food aid reform could cost 44,000 American jobs. Andrew Natsios, the USAID administrator under President George W. Bush, has called claims that food-aid reform would be bad for exports “ridiculous,” pointing out that aid accounts for only about half of 1 percent of U.S. food exports.

Maersk and others seem to have lost sight of the fact that the point of international food assistance is not to create inefficient, subsidized jobs for any company — in the United States or anywhere else. Rather, the point is to save lives. And, for the record, the actual number of U.S. maritime jobs potentially affected by reforming American food aid would be small: A Defense Department analysis found that even the administration’s more sweeping reform proposals would only “affect 8-11 vessels — all non-militarily useful — and roughly 360 to 495 mariners.”

Maersk and the Moeller family, which founded and still runs the company, are well known for their philanthropic contributions, ranging from donating the lavish Copenhagen Opera House to the state of Denmark to providing emergency container schools after the Chinese earthquake. Denmark, meanwhile, has long dedicated one of the highest international percentages of GNP in the world to official development assistance and is known as a leader in the development field. It is thus all the more a shame that Maersk’s lobbying is standing in the way of the United States, long the world’s largest provider of food assistance, delivering more aid to more people at a time when every single newscast seems to bring more stories of people in need.

The time is ripe for Maersk to do the right thing.

January 28, 2014 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs George Ingram, Carolyn Miles, and Connie Veillette

With the release of the 2014 Farm Bill, MFAN applauds Congress for including key reforms to U.S. international food assistance that would allow for greater flexibility and efficiency of our food aid programs . We commend the Farm Bill conferees, particularly the leaders of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees –  Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Ranking Member Thad Cochran (R-MS), Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK), and Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-MN), respectively – for their bipartisan efforts in pushing for these common-sense reform provisions.

U.S. international food assistance programs are critical to helping hungry people in times of crisis as well as to securing long-term food security for the world’s most vulnerable. The reforms included in the Farm Bill will help make these programs more efficient and effective so that U.S. assistance can reach more hungry people around the world.

MFAN is supportive of the provisions included in the Farm Bill to improve international food aid, including:

• The authorization of $80 million for Local and Regional Procurement (LRP), which will help save time and money and support local agriculture;
• An increase in the share of Title II (Food for Peace) funds that can be used to cover non-commodity expenses of food aid programs, allowing for a decrease in the need to monetize commodities and an increase in flexibility;
• Promoting transparency by requiring USAID to report on the costs involved in implementing food assistance programs, such as the cost recovery rate for monetized food aid.

We urge swift passage in both the House and Senate of the international food aid reform provisions included in the 2014 Farm Bill. Enacting these reforms will mean reaching hungry people faster and making U.S. taxpayer dollars more accountable.