Hill Heat

Subcommittee hearing on the Fiscal Year 2024 budget request for Near Eastern Affairs.

Witnesses:

• Barbara A. Leaf, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, U.S. Department of State
• Jeanne Pryor, Deputy Assistant, Administrator, Middle East Bureau, United States Agency for International Development

To advance the President’s regional agenda, the FY 2024 President’s Budget Request includes $7.57 billion in foreign assistance for the Middle East and Near Africa with the goal of continuing the work to build a more stable, integrated, and prosperous region.

The FY 2024 President’s Budget Request for the region includes $5.3 billion in Foreign Military Funding, maintaining our enduring commitments to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and advancing U.S. priorities in countries like Iraq, Lebanon, and Tunisia.

We supported Israel, Jordan, and the UAE to launch Project Prosperity, opening the door to regional cooperation on clean energy and water security. We are working with Saudi Arabia to develop the next generation of 5G, 6G, and OpenRAN technology. We are helping Egypt to build 10 gigawatts of renewable power.

Shortages in wheat supplies caused by Putin’s continued war on Ukraine worsened already tenuous food security across the region, which also saw poor domestic harvests due to severe droughts and water shortages.

In Libya, USAID’s work to strengthen the energy sector dramatically decreased power outages from 158 hours in the first quarter of 2022 to only 3 hours in the first quarter of 2023, providing a significant increase in reliable power for Libyans and their economy.

In Egypt, the world’s largest grain importer, USAID helped agricultural collection centers improve their storage capacity to decrease grain losses due to spoiling. USAID accomplished this through the introduction of 30 low or no cost solutions for irrigation, cooling, drying, and harvesting that cut post-harvest losses by a third. USAID programs also helped farmers get more from their seeds, reducing planting costs by 60 percent.

In Lebanon, U.S. assistance helped sustain local vegetable, legume, and dairy production by providing everything from seeds and compost to technical assistance and training. In Yemen, USAID scaled up our agriculture work to train an additional 1,200 farmers on modern approaches like greenhouses, tunnel farming, drip irrigation, and solar-water pumping.

COP 27, the United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change, hosted last year by Egypt, was particularly timely given record-breaking heat waves across the region in 2022. According to experts, the Middle East is currently warming at nearly double the rate of the rest of the world. In the future, if average global temperatures rise by two degrees, rainfall is projected to decline by 20-40 percent. As 70 percent of agriculture is rain-fed, this could significantly reduce food security and trigger climate-induced migration and greater political instability in the region. Approximately 52 million people in the MENA region are chronically undernourished and increasing droughts will push more people in that direction.

The Fiscal Year 2023 Request significantly increased funding for climate change adaptation, and does so again in the Fiscal Year 2024 Request to continue this vital work. Sustainable domestic agriculture production in the world’s most water-scarce region requires consideration of climate change impacts in all our work. For example, in Jordan, groundwater is depleted twice as fast as it can be replenished, and leaks, theft, or broken meters lead to water and revenue losses. USAID is working with the Government of Jordan’s Ministry of Water and Irrigation to strengthen infrastructure and oversight and incentivize water conservation.

With Fiscal Year 2024 resources, USAID will continue valuable partnerships, such as our work with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop energy and water saving irrigation systems. This partnership yielded low-drip technology that cuts energy requirements in half and costs 40 percent less than existing systems, which the irrigation company Toro is now commercializing.