In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

The Asia Foundation’s President, Doug Bereuter, was part of a bipartisan group of foreign policy and development leaders convened by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which called today for a renewed U.S. commitment to alleviating global poverty through agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the two regions with more than 700 million of the world’s poorest people, most of them small farmers and their families.

The Chicago Council’s report outlines five recommendations, with 21 action items, for how the United States can provide the necessary leadership to revitalize the international fight against global hunger and poverty. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, increased investments in agricultural research could help more than 270 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia lift themselves out of poverty by 2020.

Major recommendations include:

- increased agricultural education and extension at all levels,

- greater funding for agricultural research, more emphasis on expanding rural and agricultural infrastructure,

- reform of U.S. institutions that deliver agricultural development assistance, and their interactions with international institutions focused on agricultural development assistance, and

- reform of U.S. policies that discourage agricultural development abroad.

In its recommendations on reforming U.S. institutions that deliver agricultural development assistance, the report notes that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) permanent American employees has dropped from 4,058 in 1980 to 2,200 in 2008 with only a total of 16 agricultural experts on the USAID staff.

Read the report in full here.

The significance of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Asia tour has been a topic of great discussion in the media over the past week. Including Indonesia as a stop on her first trip as America’s top diplomat, signals the growing importance of Southeast Asia to the United States, and, for Indonesians, it seemed to pay tribute to the country’s hard-won political freedoms over the past decade. In Indonesia, the implications of Secretary Clinton’s visit, the timing of it, the sequence (after Japan and before China), the visitors she met (Muslim leaders carefully interspersed with ‘secular’ civil society actors and women activists), and certainly every word she uttered, has been analyzed from every angle imaginable in the country’s vibrant, free press.

The prevailing analysis here is overwhelmingly positive; the bilateral relationship seems to have not only thawed but warmed to a positively toasty degree. Initial outcomes of the visit include quick gains for both Indonesia and the U.S.: university scholarships in science and technology for the Indonesians, and the possible resumption of the Peace Corps program – consistently rejected by the government of Indonesia since the 1960s – for the Americans.

Read more »

Tourism remains one of the country’s major growth drivers. In 2007, visitor traffic reached 3.1 million and total international tourist spending reached $4.9 billion. Each tourist spends an average of $1,200 each trip and can support one job for an average Filipino worker for one year.

Boosting foreign tourist arrivals leads to increased creation of direct and indirect jobs in the tourism service industry. Thus, the Department of Tourism is targeting 5 million tourist arrivals to generate $5 billion by 2010. To do this, aviation experts say the country needs 10 million airplane seats, with at least 6 million seats to service Northeast Asian markets with a projected growth rate of 20 percent per year.

Read more »

Last Thursday in Kuala Lumpur, The Asia Foundation gathered together distinguished guests and partners to celebrate the initiatives and relationships that the Foundation has fostered in Malaysia since 1954. The event was attended by Malaysian leaders from the private, government, and civil society sectors and staff from the Foundation’s San Francisco, Washington, and Malaysia offices.

“Our past and current partners, grantees, and staff have contributed to The Asia Foundation’s legacy, and our combined efforts continue to be an important element in the successful implementation of our programs and projects in Malaysia,” said Douglas Bereuter, The Asia Foundation’s president and CEO, during his remarks that evening.

Read more »

The Japanese foreign affairs establishment welcomed Secretary Hillary Clinton’s February 16-18 visit to Tokyo with a strong dose of positive pleasure and a tad of uncertainty–even anxiety.

The country is delighted by the fact that Secretary Clinton chose to make Tokyo her very first stop on her inaugural trip as Secretary of State. The visit has also derived considerable comfort from her recent repeated description of the Japan-U.S. alliance as the “cornerstone of U.S. policy in Asia.” Finally, the Japanese public seems very pleasantly surprised by the widely-reported — but still unconfirmed — news that Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard University, the father of “smart power” and a knowledgeable observer on Japan-U.S. relations, has been offered the role of U.S. Ambassador to Japan by the Obama administration.

Read more »

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrives in Seoul today on her first visit to South Korea in her new post. South Koreans have anticipated her arrival—and the establishment of the Obama administration’s policy toward the Korean peninsula—with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. This mood has been fed by a rapid deterioration in inter-Korean relations, increasingly strident North Korean military threats toward the South, and preparations to launch a long-range missile. The agenda for the visit is broad—suggesting that the U.S.-ROK alliance is now positioned to make contributions beyond the peninsula—but the core preoccupation will remain how to deal with North Korea.

Read more »

Less than a month after taking the oath of office, President Barack Obama has shown he wants to engage with Asia in a serious, meaningful way. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first overseas trip is not to Europe or the Middle East, but to Asia. Her high-profile, week-long trip to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, and China was preceded by a major foreign policy speech on Asia in New York City. While it is unclear whether Secretary Clinton read The Asia Foundation’s “America’s Role in Asia” report, there is a remarkable similarity in what Secretary Clinton says about how the Obama administration wants to move forward in Asia, and the findings and recommendations articulated in the report. As the report states: “Asia needs to be accorded unique attention given its inherent importance to the United States. Asia contains more than half of the world’s population, produces more than 30 percent of global exports, and controls a much larger share of the world’s savings pool.”

Read more »

Seminal elections in a country’s history, such as those after a period of civil war, military rule or at the demise of an authoritarian regime, are invariably marked by the arrival of troupes of international election observers; their duty: to comment on the overall election environment and whether or not the elections held are free and fair.

There are numerous examples of this from the Asia region, including Cambodia in 1993 and Indonesia in 1999. In 2008, both Nepal and Bangladesh held milestone elections, the former after the then-government and Marxist guerillas signed a peace accord, the latter to end two years of rule by the military-installed Caretaker Government.

Read more »

Award-winning journalist Christopher Taylor has been published in the Financial Times, Fortune, Money, GQ, Esquire, and more. His blog, Everything Indonesia, features a Q&A with The Asia Foundation’s Dr. Robin Bush. Says Taylor: “No offense to politicians, but when you need a real State of the Union, you don’t go to political hacks. You go to people like Robin Bush. As Indonesia’s country rep for the Asia Foundation, she’s steeped in local culture, with her heart and soul dedicated to making the country a better place.” This is the second installment of a two-part series. Dr. Bush is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Indonesia where she manages an international and national staff of over 60 and a grants and technical assistance portfolio of over $50 million. Read “Exclusive Interview: Asia Foundation’s Robin Bush.”

Read more about the Foundation’s programs in Indonesia.

On December 29, 2008, Bangladesh held its most credible and most peaceful elections to date. They were free, fair, and without the usual violence and disruption that has accompanied most elections in Bangladesh. Voter turnout hit 88 percent, a remarkable figure for a country with a history, albeit interrupted, of regular elections.

These elections differed from years past. Both the orderly management of the elections and a belief that a new style of politics was being ushered-in in Bangladesh, gave the public a renewed sense of confidence in government. The run-up to the cancelled January 2007 elections was marred by street violence and accusations of manipulation of the voter list. In February 2007, the new members of the Bangladesh Election Commission (BEC) worked tirelessly to ensure that the December 2008 elections would be a success, and faced few of the criticisms and complaints brought against its predecessors.

Read more »