Moldova – I was hired to work as Deputy Country Director for a High Value Ag (HVA) project in Moldova. CNFA was the contractor/cooperator on this project. I sent my family there by plane in early February directly from Sarajevo and I drove my car from Bosnia, through Serbia & Romania to Chisinau, Moldova. I woke up Sunday morning and went to meet my new boss in the office. When I got there, he seemed surprised to see me. After talking for awhile, he told me that I should not have come as the project was failing. I was basically shocked and told him that it was our job to make it succeed and that I was already there with my family. By mid-April, he had already quit (encouraged to do so) and I become Acting Country Director.
GOOD – the project started as a grants project – giving grants to small farmers and agribusinesses in order to promote the production and export of HVA fruits & vegetables to the EU as Russia had just placed an embargo on Moldovan products (does Russia throwing its weight around sound familiar?). The grants application process was seen as overly burdensome and there was some question about its efficacy and possible chances for kickbacks, etc; so USAID wanted us to change how the project was implemented by providing business training for farmers and agribusinesses (what I had done in Kosovo) and provide HACCP & EurepGAP training for exporters. I lived next door to a guy working at USAID and he was back-channeling information to me on what USAID wanted our project to become before they pulled the plug on the entire project. I was working 60-70 hours per week, but over the period of about 7-8 months, we had hired additional staff (and let some others go) and trained them to train our farmer/agribusiness clients. By the time I left in July 2007, the project was deemed a success and we were truly helping the agribusiness community of Moldova.
GOOD2 – USAID also funds a project called “Farmer-to-Farmer Project” (FtF) where they bring in US farmers to work with local farmers to introduce new technology, provide training, etc. CNFA was the cooperator on this project and it was housed in a different building and well-managed by a group of local Moldovans (one of whom later became the Moldovan ambassador to the US). I usually, as a courtesy, met with these farmers for lunch or dinner as they cycled through. I think they liked meeting a fellow farmboy and someone who they could bounce ideas off of. Interestingly enough, I became good friends with one of these guys and traded products with him when we started our company in 2012.
BAD – There was a local USAID employee who had requested that we hire his girlfriend as a senior person within our project. We refused. He was rumored (actually we just couldn’t get proof on tape or paper) to be getting kickbacks from people within our project. As a compromise, someone else was given oversight on our project.
I left Moldova in July 2007 to start a biodiesel production facility in the US, but this failed due to the 2008 financial crisis.
In 2010, I was hired by CNFA (who was subcontracted to Deloitte) as the Agriculture Sector Advisor for the USAID/EPI project in the Republic of Georgia. Soon after my arrival, I found office space and hired people and got immediately to work while the other sectors were still working in hotel conference rooms writing papers about what they were going to do. We did some subsector analyses and produced some enterprise budgets, much like what I had done in Bosnia.
GREAT1 – CNFA also managed the FtF project in Georgia, so I would again meet with farmers as they came through the office. One of the first guys I met with was a greenhouse producer from Massachusetts named David. He had just been through the country and was telling me about all of the potential in Georgia to replace tomato & lettuce imports, especially since there were so many hot springs in the area. I immediately got him hired as a specialist to do greenhouse training. I think we had him there three times in the period of a year. He visited multiple greenhouse facilities over the period of two weeks (at least two per day) and got many growers energized about production. We held a large greenhouse conference and got other donors to come as well. In a nutshell, within the period of a year, there was $20 million dollars worth of investment in the sector due to our work. USAID gave very little direct funds, but our intense and detailed work encouraged investment by IFAD, World Bank, the Dutch & others who I cannot remember at this time.
BAD1 – My boss there was the worst boss I have ever had my entire life. He basically yelled at me for 10-15 minutes every morning. He ultimately yelled at the Georgian President’s Advisory Board and he got fired – five days after I had turned in my resignation because I could no longer work for him. Not only was he a tyrant, but he knew nothing about his employees professionally or personally. He treated everyone like garbage. He knew nothing about the agricultural sector & said that I didn’t know anything either. I remember him telling me in the month of May that he needed results from the potato sector. I said we would have them in September or October when they were harvested. He said he needed them immediately. I didn’t know what to tell him – it takes time to grow a potato crop.
BAD2 – I had brought a guy to Bosnia to help with blueberry production. He got some people started on production and then immediately got them an export contract. That is just the type of guy he was. I wanted to bring him to Georgia to do the same thing there – especially since blueberries were about the highest value crop you could grow legally. We had one producer come there and train on it and there was interest, especially given Georgia’s soil types. My boss shot it down in 2010 because he said there was no interest, no historical production and we shouldn’t invest our time & energy there. Imagine my surprise when I saw USAID/Georgia outlining a successful blueberry production/export project in 2024. He basically delayed a successful innovative high value crop by 14 years by not allowing me, the ag expert, work with this sector.
BAD3 – Western Georgia produces some mandarin oranges. They are an old variety and full of an immense amount of seeds. We were basically forced to work with this sector from those above us – even though the trend now is for seedless varieties – mandarin or otherwise. The main market for these oranges was Russia and given their propensity to open and close their import market at will, we did not think this was a good idea. We proposed switching to new orange varieties that would be more accepted globally, but our 4-year project would not see any results from new trees by then, so this was shot down as well. I think we did help one producer set up a cold storage & boxing facility – which was good for him.
GOOD2 – Even though I only worked in Georgia for a year, I read their end-of-project report. Probably 90% of their success in agriculture is what my group & I achieved in the first year of the project. I often wonder how much more could have been accomplished there if I had stayed for anther 1-2 years. Maybe BAD2 above could have been changed to GOOD3.
BAD4 – Our project reported to a local Georgian guy who had a PhD in mathematics. I love how someone who is smart at math thinks that they can be an agricultural expert, but someone who is an agricultural expert is smart enough to know that he cannot be a math expert. In essence, we had a local guy calling the shots on our project and somehow miraculously we got the greenhouse project going in the face of consistent undercutting. My thoughts are – if these locals know so much, then why isn’t their country more developed.
To summarize, there are good USAID projects and bad ones. The good ones tend to be led by intelligent, hard-working motivated leaders open to new concepts. The bad projects are typically led by bad managers/leaders.
The foreign nationals (local hires) within USAID have too much power over the projects – especially technical projects like agriculture. I have always believed that no foreign nationals should be allowed to work in a USAID mission overseas for more than five years. After that, they need to be cut loose to get a job in the private sector. The same goes for Americans working in USAID – although I think ten years is the more appropriate number for them.
Although there is corruption, fraud & inefficiencies within USAID, I am proud of the work that I did overseas. But, I am reminded by something Doug Casey said once “Foreign aid is money taken from poor people in rich countries and given to rich people in poor countries.” This is not correct at the project level, but is certainly a high probability at the upper echelons of the actual USAID mission.
