Mr. Chairman, Mr. President, Governors, and Distinguished Guests,

On behalf of the United States of America, it is a pleasure and an honor to address you at this 31st Session of IFAD’s Governing Council as we pay tribute to the significant difference that IFAD has made over the past three decades. 

We have all worked hard to make IFAD a stronger, more effective institution, and I think this gives us cause to be optimistic about the future.

The United States has been a strong supporter of IFAD because of the fundamental importance of agricultural development for poverty reduction and because we believe that IFAD has made significant progress in fulfilling its mandate of improving the livelihoods of the rural poor through increased agricultural productivity.

The importance of IFAD’s work has been validated by the 2008 World Development Report: Agriculture for Development which vividly highlighted the significant contribution that agricultural development can make for the world’s poorest people, who are overwhelmingly concentrated in rural areas. 

Given its unique focus on the rural poor, IFAD has an important role to play in helping achieve the millennium development goal that calls for halving the share of people suffering from extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.  

Looking back, there is much to note in terms of IFAD’s accomplishments over the last thirty years. 

Through its participatory approach and projects focused on improving agricultural productivity and raising the incomes of the rural poor, IFAD is estimated to have made a difference in the lives of over 300 million people.

Through the replication and scaling-up of these projects, IFAD has helped many others. 

We can be particularly proud of what we have accomplished during this new millennium to make IFAD a stronger institution.  I would like to commend the IFAD management team, and particularly President Båge, for their dedication to the significant reform efforts undertaken during the IFAD Sixth and Seventh Replenishment periods.  Notable accomplishments include the following:

• IFAD has implemented a transparent performance-based allocation system that directs more resources to those countries best able to help their rural poor lift themselves out of poverty. Most impressively, IFAD has developed a rural sector assessment that has become a reference for other development agencies. 
• We have catalyzed a new results-oriented culture inside IFAD which emphasizes high performance standards, rigorous evaluation, and measurable results. 
  Notable milestones in this area include the establishment of IFAD’s independent Office of Evaluation, new results-based Country Strategy and Opportunities Papers (COSOPs), and a Results Measurement Framework that is linked to IFAD’s Strategic Framework. 
• A new debt sustainability framework that provides higher levels of grants to the poorest and most debt vulnerable countries, which will help ensure that we do not perpetuate the harmful lend-and-forgive cycles of the past.
• Strengthened anti-fraud and corruption measures that include the establishment of an investigation unit and a whistleblower protection system.
• Improved transparency measures that place IFAD at the forefront of information disclosure among the multilateral development banks (MDBs).
• A range of new policies and strategies that aim to make IFAD a more effective institution through better targeting, improved project supervision, and more systematic integration of innovation and knowledge management.

We would like to commend IFAD management for its timely implementation of IFAD’s Action Plan to Improve its Development Effectiveness, through which we believe we have sown the seeds for greater success in the future.  But as we look to the Eighth Replenishment, we cannot be complacent. We need to consider how to nurture these reforms so they can fully take root.  We need to consolidate and strengthen IFAD’s emerging results-oriented culture. 

Further progress on human resources reform is essential, especially in terms of aligning staff incentives with institutional performance and results.  As strong supporters of IFAD’s project-based orientation, it will be important to redouble our efforts to ensure project sustainability, a principle area for needed improvement, and to strengthen IFAD’s role as an innovator, so that its projects are replicated and scaled up by its national and international partners.  We agree with the focus on climate change at this Governing Council meeting.  Given the risks that climate change poses for the rural poor, we look forward to discussing IFAD’s role in helping poor farmers adapt to climate change during the Eighth Replenishment consultations. 

Going forward, it is time to think boldly and pursue reforms in new areas.  Given the renewed recognition of the importance of agriculture, we believe it is important for IFAD to re-examine fundamental questions such as where it operates and how it can best achieve the maximum impact in reducing rural poverty. 

While maintaining an emphasis on country performance, we would like to look for ways to facilitate a greater flow of resources to the world’s poorest, agriculture-based countries.  The world is a very different place than it was thirty years ago, and we need to make sure that IFAD’s approach and country focus matches the challenges of today.  Part of this is ensuring that IFAD is adopting the right approach in middle-income countries, which may continue to have a need for IFAD’s technical advice and knowledge, but have less of a need for its financial resources.  We also think important changes in the structure of IFAD’s budget will be necessary so that we can maximize the share of IFAD’s budgetary resources that go to operations and include the costs of project identification, development, and supervision, currently in the Project Development Financing Facility (PDFF), more transparently and appropriately in the administrative budget. 

History shows that increasing agricultural productivity is one of the most powerful tools we have for addressing extreme poverty and hunger.  We can be proud of IFAD’s contributions over the past thirty years, but we now need to redouble our efforts to continue to provide effective assistance to the millions of rural poor that remain.  We look forward to working with you during the Eighth Replenishment to continue to strengthen IFAD so that it can be even more effective at enabling the rural poor to overcome their poverty.