TRANSCRIPT: J. Brian Atwood

Fred de Sam Lazaro, TPT: Let me begin by asking you why we in this region, in the Minnesota area, ought to really care about problems such as urbanization and growing poverty in places like Bombay or Haiti?

Atwood: Well, it's an — it's an issue that's crucial to the stability of the world and the future, our ability to continue to expand markets for American products. Traditionally this is an agriculture-based economy here. Traditionally we have used our aid to help others develop a capacity to improve their own economy through agriculture, and the consequence has been they purchase more food from the United States because their own nutritional needs improve and they want our help and they want to buy our products. If they have the money they'll buy them. So it's all -- we're all interrelated. It's a very small world.  The world's population is growing, another billion people possibly in the next ten to fifteen years and managing all of this has a direct relationship to our wellbeing here in the United States. It's an economic, it's a political issue, and it's an issue even involving such issues as terrorism. I mean, if there is -- if there continues to be anger and alienation, the terrorists are going to exploit that. I'm not suggesting that terrorist leaders are all poor, but they're going to exploit poverty and point to poverty as an example of the callousness of western society in general. So it's a threat.  

FdSL:  You've been all over the world in a long career in the foreign service. Was the fall of the eastern block, was the end of the Cold War sort of a turning point at which we saw the world completely different or was -- can you look back and say I could have seen this coming back in 1975 or back in 1980? And by that I mean the population trends especially.

FdSL: So we looked at a country and said -- and wondered first whether the leadership was pro soviet or pro American rather than --

Atwood: Right.

FdSL: -- what its actual needs were?

Atwood: We're playing the political game. I mean, if we saw someone like Mobutu in Zaire and we saw him supporting us and the U.N. or in other ways, we provide aid to him and he wasn't a very good partner because he was basically putting a lot of that aid money in Swiss bank accounts or in other ways using the fundability of aid to help himself.   And that's not the way we look at it today. The Clinton administration didn't look at it that way. The Bush administration in its criteria for the millennium challenge account that they've announced, this additional aid that they want to provide, we look at it in terms of what's effective in terms of development. That doesn't mean we've accomplished everything yet because we still have a disconnect between trade policy and finance policy and development policy. But at least with respect to development policy, we're talking from the same hymn book here, both democrats and republicans now for the first time in many years.

FdSL: And what is the basic goal? What's the -- sort of the executive summary in that hymn book? Just mixed metaphors.

Atwood: It's the -- the question of how you produce development and results. Quite obviously that best that a foreign aid program can do is to be a catalyst to positive change. You must be working with a government that's a good partner that wants to reform its own economy, that wants to cut our corruption, that wants to be much more transparent in the way they operate, that wants to create a market economy that serves people, and that really cares as much about, for example, the social needs of people, health care and education as it cares, for example, about spending money on defense. So if we work with those kinds of governments that are reform minded that allow their people, by the way, to participate in the process -- the famous Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen from Harvard has written that freedom is the most important element in development, that it is both an end and a means toward development. And if one is able to engage the people of a society in their own well being, in their own future, then you're going to be able to achieve development results. And I agree with that thesis and we've seen it work around the world.  

FdSL: Talk a little bit about this phenomenon of urbanization and the fact that in Bombay, and we'll see pictures of this, an estimated 750 people move in every single day.

FdSL: There's no place for them to stay.  

FdSL: I mean, they're living on sidewalks.   I mean, what is -- what is the potential -- what is the consequence of this going to be?

Atwood: Well, the first thing that happens is that you absolutely overwhelm the infrastructure of a city.   I saw it rather dramatically.   It came home to me because I lived in Abidjan on the Ivory Coast in about -- 20, 30 years ago, 1967. I came -- it was a city of 400,000 people. When I came back in the early '90s, there were three million people living there, and they hadn't done much to improve the infrastructure. You can imagine if you lived in a place like Minneapolis, has what, 400,000, 500,000 people, all of a sudden there are three million people living in the same basic area as those 500,000 people.   You just couldn't deal with it in a 20-year period and no number of tax increases or special bond motions that you put before the people could ever compensate for the change. And that's what's happening. People are moving from the rural areas into the cities at such a rate because that's where they think they can find a job, that's where they think they can find education and healthcare for their children because there's -- there are more people there and there are more services than what they can find in the rural areas. And so rural development continues to be a very important element of overall development to stop this trend toward urbanization. Urbanization has all sorts of other consequences, people living close to one another, disease, environmental decay. Concerns that we have about global warming, for example, are going to -- and most of the global warming is caused by the western powers right now, in particular, the United States. But countries like China and India area crawling up very fast because they have to have the power to service all those people. You know, there is so little electricity available to continue the economic growth rates that China and India are both experiencing right now, and if they don't continue to see this economic growth rate, they will not be able to service the new population that's coming on board each year. Their population growth rates are in some cases, you know, 2 to 3 percent and they've got to have about 8 to 10 percent economic growth to do it, and yet they don't have the power so they're using coal. They're using old power plants and building new ones that aren't terribly efficient, and the consequence is global warming, more greenhouse gasses being put into the atmosphere.  

FdSL: In xxx moral vacuum, if you will, is that the most proximate threat to us living here in the Midwest, the global warming or are there other things --

Atwood: It's a serious threat. It's a serious threat. There is also the threat of disease. I mean, we worry about West Nile fever. We've got -- we worry about SARS. We worry about all of these, HIV AIDS. I mean, all of these are manifestations of poverty basically. People that are unable to care for themselves, no health surveillance systems and the like. And then, of course, global warming is really going to have an impact here on our capacity to produce agriculture. It may have a positive impact for a while, but in the long run you will see various species dying off because of it. So where -- you know, one has to look a little bit into the future here, and if one really accepts the notion that we're like a giant ocean liner heading toward an iceberg, we better start turning that ocean liner around or else we're going to have a disaster that will really have a major impact on our people.

FdSL: You know, given the attention span and the political cycles, you know, that most nations in the world face today, I mean, how does one get beyond -- I mean, how does one look, you know, so far into the future? And you know, speaking pragmatically, I mean, is it -- are you hopeful at all that we can surmount, you know, sort o the immediate imperatives that drive political decision making now? I mean, is an immediate imperative to feed all these people moving into Bombay? How do you look at global warming in that context?

Atwood: Well, I think it's obviously a question of political leadership and political will, accepting this science as we see it. I mean, one of the problems we have when we don't like what the scientists tell us is that we disagree with their scientific work and yet we have no real basis for doing it. I mean, politicians seem to find it very easy to disagree with the 1500 or so scientists at the U.N. that convene on the issue of global warming because they didn't like what they said because it means that we have to change our behavior, and changing behavior means that it has political consequences. Now, the problem is getting to the point where we can accept what the threat is. I mean, we had a dramatic change in our attitude as a nation as a result of September 11, 2001. All of a sudden, we became -- we felt vulnerable and we began to take various actions. One can debate whether all of the actions have been positive in dealing with the war against terrorism.   But if we had leadership that enabled us to look ahead of the horizon to see the potential dangerous consequences were coming beyond the horizon and we could take steps now to prevent them, I think most of the American people have the common sense to say let's support that kind of leadership. Frankly, we don't have it. All we have is a debate that maybe the science isn't very good or maybe if we had -- took an optimistic view of the future that some technology that's coming along would solve the problem and therefore we don't have to plan for the future. I think if we plan for the future we will find the technology, we will be able to solve the problems, but right now we don't have the political will.  

FdSL: I'm just wondering when it comes to Haiti now which is much closer to us and, you know ..........., this would be even more urgent, but even there there's a proximity that becomes an issue. You know, we'll be watching tape of people abandoning the rural areas of Haiti coming to Port-au-Prince and then, you know, spilling out onto the shores of Miami in despair, for the most part. From your experience as a development expert, I mean, what can be done to keep people in rural areas? I assume that most of them, given a chance, would like to stay. You know, it would be socially much more comfortable --

Atwood: Right.

FdSL: -- in the village where they were born.  

Atwood: I've been all over Haiti. The first assignment I had when President Elect Clinton asked me to head up the transition team at the state department was Haiti. I met many times with President Aristide. I went to Haiti. We clearly had a situation there where thousands of Haitians were building boats to come over to the United States as soon as President Clinton was elected -- was -- took office, I mean. We had a situation where the US Navy and Coastguard were surrounding Haiti, spending millions of dollars a day to prevent people from coming to our shore. And the obvious answer to it was putting the democratic government back into power in Haiti and then helping that democratic government develop the country so that jobs were available in Haiti. I've been to Haiti at the time of the Hurricane Georges, it was called, with Mrs. -- with Mrs. Clinton actually at the time and with under -- HUD Secretary Quomo, and we saw what was happening in the rural areas. It was tremendous flooding because part of the problem is that when you use the wrong agricultural techniques and you use slash and burn techniques, you ruin the topography when it rains to the extent that it did in that case. You have flooding and you basically wipe away the territory. I mean, if you look at Haiti today it's been de-forested to the point now where there really isn't anything that holds back the rain and the consequence is you can't farm in the rural areas. Agriculture is the key to rural development. It's the way that individuals over years have made a living. And when they can't make a living that way anymore, they have no choice but to move to the cities. So I think we were very deficient in under-funding agricultural development during the Clinton years. It's very difficult to understand why given the fact that the farmers in this country, a very strong lobby, and they've always supported working overseas because that creates markets for their goods, but the fact of the matter is we cut our agricultural budget way back at AID because it didn't seem to have a constituency on Capitol Hill, and that, it seems to me, the only way. We -- we did plant millions of trees in Haiti. We tried to plant trees that were cash crop-type trees so they wouldn't be chopped down and used for wood. That helped with respect to the watershed in many areas of Haiti, but we haven't kept up with it. And for political reasons we've decided not to continue supporting President Aristide's government, and the consequence is that all of that work is -- has gone for not. We've kind of wasted a lot of money by not following through. When you're involved in a development exercise such as the one we were involved in in Haiti you're on a treadmill. You have to keep going. You have to keep spending money, investing and encouraging the people to participate in the projects. Once you stop it, they lose hope and you basically fall back again. You fall off the treadmill, in essence, and that's what's happened in Haiti.

FdSL: So does that set it back even more? I mean, at this juncture if you were to take a snapshot of the situation today and have free reign to begin to initiate some kinds of developments, what would you do in an area like xxx, which is this village that we visited? I mean, what immediate initiatives could really help turn around the population, in fact, have some people come back home from, you know, the cities where they fled?

Atwood: Well, first you'd have to look at what type of agriculture could they grow there. You'd have to look at infrastructure and see whether or not they had farmed and market roads, for example.   You'd have to look at financing to see whether or not they had the resources available to purchase the seed and the fertilizer. You'd have to look at the system for helping them with the modern agriculture so they're not using techniques that will ruin the land and will help them maximize their yields. All of those things need to be done almost simultaneously so a whole variety of projects, if you were to focus on that one village, you'd really have to determine can they grow coffee here. I mean, there's a wonderful Haitian blue coffee that is exported to the United States that they grow in certain areas. I'm not sure this is the prefect area for that or not, but that's a cash crop. When farmers get a little cash in their pockets, what they do is go out and buy seed to grow food for their family. So you solve a number of problems by finding the right kind of crop, but then you've got to provide additional credit so that they can purchase modern farm vehicles so that they can build the roads necessary to get the crops to market. It's a very comprehensive effort and there have been very few parts of the world where we've undertaken that. Obviously more assistance has to be given by the government of Haiti as well to this kind of endeavor. If they don't do it, they're going to see Port-au-Prince getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more poverty and more slums.  

FdSL: So it begins in the village assessing what might be a good enough crop, raising the standard of living, when the farmers get more affluent, they buy stuff.

Atwood: That's right.

FdSL: A lot of which we make in the United States and so everybody prospers.

Atwood: Right, exactly.

FdSL: Okay. I've heard that our own domestic politics -- and you've already alluded to it in different -- you know, in a different context, but our own politics complicates matters. I was wondering how devastating you think the subsidies we give our rice farmers here have been to Haiti where rice was a cash crop, was, you know, a big export at one point. It's almost non-existent there now.

Atwood: Yeah, and there is such potential to grow rice in Haiti, but you've got to have a market for it. And when you've -- you're a small country on the shore of the United States, the United States market is the magnet for all of Central America, all of the Caribbean. And when we basically subsidize our rice producers here, you may be helping people in a very small part of our country, but you're hurting large numbers of people who will resort to getting on boats and coming to the United States or they'll start doing things like growing coca for cocaine and start shipping drugs into our country. So it's a narrow policy to -- you know, to solve a certain small number of farmers' problems by giving them a rice subsidy and then creating bigger problems, on the other hand. One has to take a holistic comprehensive view of it rather than a narrow political view to solve the problems of the Louisiana rice producers. It just doesn't make sense from a national point of view for us.

FdSL: I have a couple of final questions on the whole issue of urbanization. Is -- are we then to assume that the future, whether it's in rural Haiti or rural India or, you know, vast parts of the African continent, that the future lies in, in fact, agriculture, predominantly in food production, as opposed to anything else? I mean, are we getting people back to the farm, for the most part?

Atwood: I think that's the most important aspect of it and it relates not just to their wellbeing. It's one way they can create wealth for themselves in the rural areas. But it also -- it also is the only way that some of these areas can compete on the global economy, assuming the global economy has a fair playing field, has a level playing field for them. It's very, very important for them to be thinking more comprehensively about how they market these goods. I worked in Nigeria on a cassava project where they produce more cassava than any other country in the world, and yet they destroy most of it because they only use it for local purposes. They could be exporting that to Europe, to regional countries, but they don't have the distribution system. They don't use the modern techniques of farming. They don't have proper infrastructure. They don't have the manufacturing to make the right products. Didn't know this, but you can make over 100 products with cassava. So you need to figure out what your market is. I mean, if you want to sell cassava chips to Europe to feed cows, that's one product that you could use. There are many others. You could use starch, make cassava starch. People need to do this analysis and figure out how they can become competitive because if we continue in these countries to see them only because of their raw materials, oil or mining materials of various types or their low wages, they will always have a comparative disadvantage. They themselves, if they're going to develop, have to be -- have to be competitive on the world market today. And that's what the development challenge really is.

FdSL: So their future cannot be in stitching shirts for you and me in Minneapolis.

Atwood: That might be a good way to start, but they need obviously to see that there is potential to build beyond that and to become globally competitive. If you want to start stitching shirts, then you better see what the market for shirts is around the world and you better be able eventually to compete with the best. That may mean competing with who, the British, the Dutch, the Italians with -- for shoes, for example. But you better be able to produce products that can compete eventually otherwise you're going to have the lowest niche in the market and you're going to continue to have low wages in your own country, and the only advantage you'll have is that you have low wages and they'll never get any higher.

FdSL: There's no development in its most meaningful sense then.

Atwood: Absolutely, yeah. That's right.

FdSL: Is there a difference between large countries and small countries and what are those differences in terms of looking ahead down the road? Is the prognosis .......... better for larger developing nations, India, China, Brazil even perhaps, even though it's more affluent versus, you know, the Malis, Chads --

Atwood: Yeah.

FdSL: -- and Haitis?  

Atwood: Yeah, I think the smaller countries clearly have to look on a regional basis to see what kinds of coalitions they can form in order to be competitive, and they must look at the countries in their own region to see whether they're trading partners as well as partners for production purposes. The larger countries have -- are able obviously to work to scale and there's certainly plenty of employment opportunities for people there. But there's still huge amounts of poverty in China and India. I mean, they still have to develop their own economy and to some extent, if they can do that, they've got a ready market right within their own borders, just as the United States developed its own economy by not exporting very much in the early days. We now increasingly export our products, but we had a large market and we were able to service it and people's corporations grew as a result of that. So there is -- you know, small countries -- but where they're geographically located is a factor. I mean, if they have a port, it makes it easier. Their culture matters. If their culture is inwardly looking and they don't really have any tolerance for other ethnic groups, they're not going to be very good on the global marketplace. If their -- if their culture has a high tolerance for corruption, they're not going to be a very receptive place for corporations. They don't want to mess around with all of that corruption. I mean, it's just not something that -- the right kind of environment for investment. So culture does matter as well.

FdSL: Okay. Are there any other -- do you have any other thoughts on this whole phenomenon of urbanization? You know, and you've talked a lot about the overall problem of overpopulation, poverty and the consequences of it. Where do you see this trend leading as you -- you know, as you look ahead perhaps a few years and then a more distant future? I mean, where do you see these trends leading on urbanization?

Atwood: Well, obviously they are very troubling trends. There was a conference on urbanization during the Clinton administration. I believe it was in Istanbul. And the discussions about the consequences of all of this in terms of health and -- of people. You're going to see more tragedies happening, whether famine or disease. Large populations are going to die off as a result of what's happening. It's creating pollution problems and that means health problems. That means you can never get caught up. And it's also creating problems for the rest of the world, as I mentioned before, because of global warming and the greenhouse gasses that are produced as a result of it. I think it's a crucial issue. The other issue that is -- that is involved here is that in most of these new urban areas, 60 percent of the population are under the age of 21. And so you've got large numbers of youth that have nothing to do that have a lot of energy, presumably, if they're not starving, who potentially could become very dangerous characters. Either it turns into a fail state situation like in Liberia today or they become terrorists and they become very angry about their prospects for the future. They don't like what they see. The interesting thing about the urbanization and the poverty is that all of these people have access to American movies. They know what we live -- how we live in this country. They know how they live in Europe and they say why can't that be us. I mean, why, because of the fate of where we were born, do we have to live in this terrible poverty? That creates anger. It creates alienation and potentially it creates terrorism

FdSL: Excelent. Thanks very much.