Foreign Agricultural Service

• 1. Introduction

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  The Foreign Agricultural Service began with a single man and a suitcase. In 1882, the United States Department of Agriculture sent Edmund Moffat to London, making him the first USDA employee stationed abroad. He carried the unusual dual identity of a USDA statistical agent and a Deputy Consul General on the State Department's books. That awkward arrangement, one person serving two masters, would set off nearly a century of bureaucratic tug-of-war over who controls American agricultural diplomacy.

  From that modest beginning, the agency would eventually manage food aid programs running into the billions of dollars, broker grain agreements with the Soviet Union, and dispatch officers to reconstruct the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture after a war. It would be abolished, renamed, merged, split, reconstituted, and folded into other agencies more times than most people can count. Its motto today reads, "Linking U.S. Agriculture to the World." The road to that mission was anything but straight.

• 2. Finding Its Footing

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  By 1901, what started as a single statistical posting had grown into a Section of Foreign Markets with seven employees. The unit kept expanding over the following decades, staffed by agricultural statistical agents, commodity specialists, and officials carrying the title "agricultural commissioner." By the early 1920s, an analytical unit in Washington, supervised by Leon Estabrook of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, was pulling together reports from USDA field staff, U.S. consuls, and data from the Rome-based International Institute of Agriculture.

  The overseas agents faced a persistent problem: they lacked diplomatic status. Without it, their access to time-sensitive market information was routinely blocked. In 1924, USDA officials Nils Olsen and Louis Guy Michael joined with Congressman John Ketcham to draft legislation that would give agricultural attachés formal diplomatic standing. The bill passed the House repeatedly but stalled in the Senate for six years, partly because of opposition from then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover. Hoover later reversed course when he needed the support of the farm bloc during his presidential campaign.

  The Foreign Agricultural Service Act of 1930, carrying the citation 46 Stat. 497, was signed into law by President Herbert Hoover on the 5th of June 1930. The new agency's first Washington chief was Asher Hobson, described in the source as a noted economist and political scientist. One of his first hires was Lazar Volin, a Russian emigre brought on as the agency's first D.C.-based regional analyst, assigned specifically to track Russia as a competitor to American agriculture. FAS quickly expanded its overseas presence to cities including Marseille, Pretoria, Belgrade, Sydney, and Kobe.

• 3. The Trade Policy Turn

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  Congress passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934, and that single law changed the character of FAS permanently. It required the President to consult the Secretary of Agriculture before negotiating tariff reductions on agricultural commodities. Secretary Henry A. Wallace handed that responsibility directly to the Foreign Agricultural Service Division, pulling the agency into the center of international trade policy.

  FAS led the first round of new agricultural tariff agreements, starting with Cuba, then Belgium, Haiti, Sweden, Brazil, and Colombia. By 1939, agreements were in place with 20 countries. The United Kingdom stood as the United States' largest agricultural trading partner at that time. These negotiations also changed what the field staff was expected to do. Attachés who had previously focused on commodity reporting now had to add policy analysis to their work, feeding Washington the information it needed to negotiate effectively.

  On the 1st of December 1938, the Foreign Agricultural Service Division was elevated and placed directly under the Secretary of Agriculture, dropping the word "Division" from its name. That independence lasted less than a year. On the 1st of July 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt transferred all diplomatic personnel, including the agricultural attachés, to the State Department. The Foreign Agricultural Service was abolished and replaced by the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations. Its director at the time, Leslie A. Wheeler, was appointed to both the Board of the Foreign Service and the Board of Examiners, a formal recognition of the office's foreign affairs standing.

• 4. War, Aid, and Global Reach

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  Under the name Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations, the agency took on food aid for the first time. President Roosevelt and Congress authorized $1.35 billion in food assistance to Great Britain in 1941. OFAR simultaneously led negotiations that created the International Wheat Council and began working with Latin American countries to develop their agricultural sectors, driven partly by the need to secure strategic commodities and to keep Nazi Germany from gaining influence in South America.

  During the war itself, OFAR analyzed food availability in both Allied and enemy countries and pushed for the stockpiling of 100 million bushels, equal to roughly 2.7 million metric tons, of wheat. The plan was to have reserves ready to feed refugees after the war ended. When the fighting stopped, the agency helped carry out land reform in Japan and channeled agricultural technical assistance through both the Marshall Plan and the Point Four Program. By 1953, OFAR had approximately 400 agricultural specialists working in 27 foreign countries.

  OFAR was also present at the founding of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, with Leslie A. Wheeler playing a particularly central role. The agency took part in negotiating the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, signed in 1947, though agriculture would not become a major focus of those talks until the Uruguay Round decades later. The three stated goals of OFAR's work during this period were, in order: countering communism, promoting U.S. agricultural exports, and improving diets in foreign countries.

• 5. Reconstitution and Trade Battles

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  On the 10th of March 1953, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson dissolved OFAR and brought the Foreign Agricultural Service back into existence. The following year, following passage of H.R. 8033, the agricultural attachés were transferred back from the State Department to FAS, ending a 15-year separation. Congress also passed Public Law 480, the Food for Peace Act, in the same year, which became the central legal foundation for FAS food aid. Attachés began negotiating deals for concessional sales of farm commodities on terms of up to 30 years, payable in foreign currencies, under an unusual provision that allowed agreements to bypass the Senate's normal advice and consent process.

  In 1955, FAS signed its first cooperative agreement with an American producer group, the National Cotton Council, to expand foreign demand for that commodity. The program eventually became known as the Market Development Cooperator Program.

  The agency's trade work came to a head dramatically in 1962 with what became known as the "Chicken War." The European Economic Community imposed protective tariffs on American poultry in retaliation for President Kennedy's ceiling on textile imports and tariff increases on carpets, glass, and bicycles. FAS negotiators, including a future agency administrator named Rolland "Bud" Anderson, supported talks that resulted in the EEC paying $26 million in damages. Anderson's own assessment was blunt: "We won the battle but lost the war," he said, as U.S. poultry exports to Europe soon became negligible. A second dispute, called the "Poultry War," erupted in 2002 when Russia barred American poultry imports in response to U.S. steel tariffs.

• 6. The Great Grain Robbery

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  In 1972, a short grain crop hit the Soviet Union. The Soviets moved quietly, purchasing contracts through a small number of secretive private multinational grain traders who dominated the world cereal market. A spring crop survey had suggested a normal harvest, and the FAS agricultural attaché in Moscow decided not to follow up with additional crop observation travel. That decision meant a severe drought, which set in after the last field trip, went undetected by the agency.

  By the time the scale of Soviet purchases became known, the USSR had locked in supplies at low, subsidized prices. Other importing nations and consumers scrambled for what remained at significantly higher prices. The episode became known as the "Great grain robbery." Its consequences for FAS were lasting. The agency created a satellite imagery unit specifically for remote sensing of foreign crop conditions. It negotiated a long-term grain agreement with the Soviet Union. It pushed through an export sales reporting requirement for American grain exporters. The affair also fixed in the agency's institutional culture a conviction about the irreplaceable value of direct, on-the-ground observation in key countries.

  The 1980s brought a different kind of trade pressure. The European Economic Community began subsidizing its own grain exports aggressively, undercutting American sales. Farm-state legislators, led by Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, pressed through the Export Enhancement Program, which Senator Dole originally called "BICEP." By the mid-1990s, the program was largely abandoned in favor of pursuing a multilateral ban on agricultural export subsidies through negotiations. EEP's final use, a single sale, came during the Clinton administration. The founding of the World Trade Organization in January 1995 capped trade-distorting domestic agricultural supports and banned absolute import quotas.

• 7. Food Aid and Security Work

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  FAS has operated food assistance programs continuously since 1941, drawing on a layered set of legal authorities accumulated over decades. Section 416(b) of the Agricultural Act of 1949 enables donation of surplus commodities overseas. Title I of Public Law 480 authorizes concessional sales. The 1985 Farm Bill added the Food for Progress program, which opened a channel for delivering aid through non-governmental organizations in addition to foreign governments.

  The McGovern/Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program, named for Senators George McGovern and Bob Dole, was authorized by the 2002 Farm Bill and reauthorized in 2008. It supports school feeding programs in less developed countries and preserves authority for maternal and child health programs. A pilot version, the Global Food for Education program, ran beginning in fiscal year 2001.

  FAS returned to national security work in 2003 when it posted agricultural officers to Baghdad, not to gather market intelligence but to help rebuild the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture. The agency also began organizing USDA contributions to Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack pledged to continue and expand that work, though the national security role remained a subject of internal debate within the agency. Since the Foreign Service Act of 1980 brought FAS formally under its umbrella, the vast majority of FAS's overseas agricultural officers have served as Foreign Service Officers, and since 1953, a total of 12 former agricultural attachés have been confirmed as American Ambassadors.