VOA标准英语2012--USAID Prioritizes to Boost Impact in Africa
时间：2012-03-23 03:55:05
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USAID Prioritizes to Boost Impact in Africa
Villagers near Senegal’s River Delta1 plan a year-long rotation2 of crops to supplement their diets and incomes. USAID provides technical guidance and has constructed wells for irrigation, helping3 to turn fertile soil into flourishing gardens. Ngara Diatta tends an onion patch that will later produce tomatoes, eggplants, and cabbage.
"Before, goats and cows would
trample4 our garden and eat the vegetables," said the gardener. "It was upsetting to work so hard and have it all ruined. Now thanks to this project, we have fences to protect our crops and I can sleep peacefully. This project has changed our lives. We can sell these vegetables to help our families."
USAID also helped to construct an earthen
dike5 and concrete
retention6 basin to keep out saltwater and retain freshwater, allowing hundreds of hectares of land to be
reclaimed7 for farming.
"The groundwater used to be so deep that gardening was difficult. Thanks to the dike, we can find water easily. Now when the rice harvest is over, people plant vegetables. We can work year round," said community leader Abdoulaye Ndiaye.
The Senegal project is part of a global U.S. anti-hunger campaign called Feed the Future.
“Food aid costs eight-to-10 times more than investing in helping people produce and sustain their own
futures8 through agriculture," said USAID
Administrator9 Rajiv Shah. "We are starting to see real results in our Feed the Future
partnership10, with countries in that program experiencing a rate of agricultural productivity growth nearly eight times the global average.”
Foreign assistance accounts for one percent of U.S. government
expenditures11 - a share considered too high by some lawmakers at a time of massive U.S. indebtedness.
“You are going to have to convince me why it is necessary to borrow more money from communist China in order to give money to some other country or some other group of people,” said
Congressman12 Dana Rorhabacher.
Other legislators say fighting hunger, poverty and disease abroad is in America’s national interest.
“It is
infinitely13 cheaper to address these problems with economic and technical assistance now than to wait until fragile states
collapse14 or conflicts erupt in wide-scale violence and we have to resort to
costly15 emergency aid or even military action,” Congressman Howard Berman.
In rural Senegal, USAID’s impact is plain to see.
"We hear of rice shortages in Dakar but here, we do not have that problem," said Abdoulaye Ndiaye, Toubacouta Council president. "We are eating rice that we grow. We prepare it with oil from peanuts we farmed, and serve it with onions, eggplant, and cabbage. We thank the Americans for their continued support."
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