The United States congratulates President Nwanze for his reelection as President of IFAD. His strong leadership and tireless commitment to rural development have made IFAD a vanguard institution that is poised to respond to some of the most critical challenges of the 21st century: rural poverty and food insecurity.  President Nwanze has also assembled a uniquely qualified Management team – a sign of his vision and leadership.

While the world today continues to experience tremendous volatility in food prices, we are all too aware that the brunt of the burden falls on the poorest. It is against this backdrop that the United States has made global food and nutrition security a core development priority. We view IFAD as a vital partner in this pressing work.

The past year has been critical for IFAD, which completed a very strong ninth replenishment.  In this context, donors committed to a record replenishment of 1.5 billion dollars, despite very difficult budgetary constraints, and IFAD affirmed its commitments to a robust reform agenda designed to expand and strengthen its development impact.

We support the ambitious goals President Nwanze and his team have set.  While continuing to deliver meaningful results in challenging environments, IFAD will also seek to improve the sustainability of its development impact on communities and countries by scaling up its projects and deepening its policy dialogue with member states. This will enable IFAD to replicate projects that are successful and learn from projects that do not meet expectations, as well as influence key policies that have a direct bearing to the lives of the rural poor. 

The United States also endorses IFAD’s work on climate change and gender mainstreaming.  Particularly, we look forward to IFAD’s work helping rural farmers to adopt climate resilient, low emission farming and land use practices. We strongly commend IFAD for recognizing the vital role of gender in rural development and for making the integration of gender issues an institutional priority, as demonstrated by its record in 2010-11 during which close to 80 percent of IFAD projects evaluated were focused on promoting gender empowerment. 

We also look forward to engaging with IFAD over the next year on how it can be more effective in the most difficult and challenging environments – namely fragile states – where IFAD is uniquely poised to play a key role by virtue of its grassroots approach.

We welcome IFAD’s strong commitment to development effectiveness on the ground. In this regard, we believe that the Independent Office of Evaluation (IOE) is an indispensable source of knowledge and its products have contributed directly to IFAD’s performance.  IOE’s Annual Report on Results and Impact is an especially valuable product, providing methodological integrity, depth and insight.

On human resource management, IFAD continues to make significant strides by introducing more flexibility into its HR policies and performance based budgeting.  We hope that these difficult yet vital reforms can serve as an example to other agencies within the UN system.  

Finally, IFAD has made important strides on financial management and modernizing its approach to portfolio management by providing sound investment guidelines to support implementation of its newly adopted investment policy. The United States looks forward to IFAD’s new Advance Commitment Authority model which will align IFAD with best practice at other IFIs.

We ask a lot of IFAD, and in turn, IFAD continues to deliver strong results. Today the institution is lending at record rates, close to $2 billion a year, and is transforming the lives of people throughout the world. We look forward to continuing our deep and close engagement with the IFAD as it strives to become the leading financier of smallholder farmers in the world.

Thank you.