DOHA (AFP) — The head of the US delegation at the UN's Doha conference on aid denied on Saturday that the absence of most leaders of the world's major economies means the meeting is a waste of time.
"The conference is very worthwhile. The development ministers are here. Those are the people through whom development financing is done," Henrietta Fore, the state department's director of US foreign assistance, told AFP in an interview.
The work of the US Agency for International Development, of which Fore is also administrator, is continuing as normal ahead of the January inauguration of Barack Obama as US president, she said.
President George W. Bush "has kept to the aid commitments made in the Monterrey Consensus in 2002 and there is every indication" that Obama will honour the commitments, Fore said.
Obama has pledged to double international aid.
Fore, who was nominated as USAID administrator by Bush and now reports to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, may lose her job under the Obama administration but until then she is pressing on with efforts to maintain and step up US help to developing countries.
In Doha she sees her key role as urging other countries to keep to or increase their aid commitments, and back home she is supporting legislation before Congress to increase some categories of aid.
Fore spoke following a seminar organised by USAID on aid to agriculture, for which Washington allocates a budget of 2.5 billion dollars a year, much of it to Africa. "I think this will need to increase. We have had requests to increase it," she said.
The impact of the economic crisis on individual development schemes depends on each category, but "where private-public partnerships are needed, such as for infrastructure projects, some are in the balance," she said.
Fore's ambition for agriculture programmes in Africa is for growth in farm productivity to be greater than population growth, something that has failed to happen in recent decades while Asia has increased production faster than population expansion.
Jacques Taylor, head of agriculture banking for Standard Banking of South Africa, said there is vast potential for increasing food production in Africa as productivity averages 1.3 tonnes per hectare compared with 5.5 in the European Union and 6.5 to 7 percent in the US.
If development finance is available, "it ought to be easier to achieve a doubling of the 1.3 tonnes rather than a similar increase elsewhere," he told the seminar.
Non-governmental agencies have criticised the absence of most major heads of state from the four-day conference on Financing to Development, which aims to update the Monterrey goals in the light of the credit crunch.
Only 10 national leaders attended a "retreat" called by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday intended to decide "concrete" proposals to build on the aims agreed at the Group of 20 summit in Washington on November 15.
Ariane Arpa, head of the Oxfam International delegation in Doha, said on Friday: "Very few rich country leaders have chosen to take part" in Ban's meeting or the conference itself.
"The fact that so few heads of state have seen fit to travel to Doha is a real cause for concern," she said.
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