Earlier this year, U.S. President Donald Trump proposed what critics called “draconian cuts” to his country’s foreign affairs spending. That included zeroing out support to the Rome-based IFAD, a specialized United Nations agency that supports small-scale farmers, pastoralists, and entrepreneurs in some of the poorest parts of the world.
But despite the potential loss of the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s largest donor, the organization’s president, Alvaro Lario, is optimistic — and not just because it has faced down such a threat before.
During the first Trump administration, IFAD was slated to receive nothing from the U.S. government; after the president’s budget request made its way through Congress, the organization regained its long-standing bipartisan support.