Today, millions of African farmers and their families are struggling to feed themselves adequately and overcome the debilitating effects of absolute poverty. With the likely demise of USAID, that struggle is about to get immeasurably harder.

For more than 60 years, the men and women of USAID have served as a beacon of light, consistently illuminating the world’s drive to preserve human life, dignity, and peace. Among many other things, they have worked hard to end the trap of low-productivity agriculture and supported the breeding of improved varieties of Africa’s major food crops through grants to US universities, the CGIAR, and national agricultural research institutes.

That work has helped farmers improve their yields and reduce their harvest risks.  USAID has also supported the establishment and growth of private, independent seed companies and village-based agro-dealers who guarantee that Africa’s left-behind smallholder farmers can access new, more efficient and higher-yielding crop varieties.

As a result, in many countries rates of hunger and malnutrition have fallen dramatically, and rural economies have prospered.  Reversing course now will spell doom for millions of left-behind farm families who also aspire to rise above hopelessness and the debilitating poverty of subsistence-level farming.

At SSG, we’ve seen the impact of USAID’s programs up close. Even when their funding decisions didn’t go our way, we were at least given an audience for our ideas and advice on how to continue with our mission.

Of course, every group of people – from government agencies to private companies – can and should find ways to cut waste, and operate more efficiently, and USAID is no exception.  But to shutter an institution as essential as USAID risks inviting economic costs for both the developing and developed world which will dwarf any possible savings.  And this cost will be paid by generations to come.

At SSG we feel privileged to go to work every day and try to help communities sustainably harvest sufficient food for themselves and even offer surpluses to meet growing market demand.  Higher-yielding, more efficient crop varieties are a passageway out of the misery of subsistence-level farming.  

The staff members at USAID have been a consistent source of support and encouragement in this mission – celebrating our successes and lamenting our setbacks.  They never questioned the importance of our efforts, because they could see where we wanted to go:  to nourish and integrate smallholder farm families into a growing world economy; to achieve the UN Development Goals; to create opportunities for local youth that guard against the hopelessness that feeds extremism; to give potential migrant populations hope for a better life in their own home countries; and to do the practical, unglamorous work that makes this world a better place for all of us.  

Any institution with these aims, whatever its source or nationality, must not be allowed to perish.