University of Wisconsin College of Agricultural and Life Sciences professor Michael Carter will administer a $10 million, five-year federal program aiming to curtail poverty in third-world nations.
The program, called the Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program, is part of a United States Agency for International Development effort addressing global poverty.
Carter said a major focus of the project is creating a form of food aid that would not leave poor people in a "poverty trap," where they have to reach a certain level of "misery" to qualify for public assistance, and then become dependent on foreign support.
"We don't want to push people in the trap before you help them," Carter said. "Social policy [needs to] keep people out of the trap so they can help themselves in the long term."
Carter added that the project is mainly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, with some pilot projects likely happening in Peru and Ethiopia.
UW international studies professor Jon Pevehouse said Carter has a "tremendous amount" of experience working with people in the developing world with microfinancing and microdevelopment — what Pevehouse called "cutting through all the red tape" that goes along with large grants from agencies.
"Being able to get the money right into the hands of, say, a farmer, can provide the farmer with more money rather than going through five layers of bureaucracy," Pevehouse said.
AMA CRSP teams American scientists with researchers from developing countries to address obstacles of severe poverty.
Carter said there are two basic causes for severe poverty, and the both serve as reasons people in developing countries remain so poor.
The first reason, he said, is that the people do not have many productive assets to work with, and the second is a lack of access to markets necessary to utilize the assets they do have.
"If you don't have enough money to buy raw materials you need to get the business going, you're not going to make progress," Carter said.
A big problem in existing microfinance models, according to Carter, has to do with the amount of risk required for poor families to advance economically.
In today's globalized world, a farmer living in a developing nation could sell crops to the United States to try to make money — but Carter explained that it may take an entire year's salary for that person to make such an investment, which may only have a 25-percent chance of helping them.
"It takes money to get money," Carter said. "And if you're poor, by definition, you don't have money."
Pevehouse said Carter being selected to lead AMA CRSP is a "huge deal" for UW, adding that it is especially noteworthy since Carter is a professor in the Midwest, when most grants addressing the fight against poverty go to universities on the East Coast.
"It is always big when federal grants are given to public policy issues outside the east coast to faculty that aren't close to Washington or New York," Pevehouse said. "It expresses a lot of confidence in his ability."
