Transcript
NIGEL PURVIS: ...
Our subject for today is Environment, Poverty, and the MCC: Leveraging U.S. Aid to Improve Natural Resource Management.
Yesterday morning at sunrise, I was in Colorado at the great Sand Dunes National Park, this country's newest national park, and as I stood in the San Luis Valley, a really pristine beautiful wetland, I think the highest and largest wetland in this country at about 10,000 feet, it really occurred to me that there was a tremendous connection between the national park and the subject that we would be discussing today, oddly.
It is an incredibly beautiful place that has been managed sustainably by humans, by the Native American population going back several thousand years. As a result of public-private partnership between groups like the Nature Conservancy and the Clinton and the Bush administrations and the Congress, we have been able to piece together private lands and public lands to create this country's newest and one of the most interesting national parks in the national park system.
It is as a result of that kind of a partnership between government and the private sector and also the underlying laws and governance that we have in this country are incentives that we provide for individuals to donate land and to get tax deductions, the benefits that can be had through conservation easements that are also tax deductible that we were able to piece together several hundred thousand acres to create that park.
It is exactly that kind of a public-private partnership and an underlying governance that leads to the sustainable management of natural resources that we have an opportunity to try and carry forward into developing countries to ensure that there is an appropriate set of institutions and laws and actions that allow them to manage their natural resources in the most sustainable and appropriate way possible that contributes to economic growth and poverty alleviation in particular, but it also maintains the pristine natural environment.
So our theme today is to expand on and address that challenge, how to leverage foreign aid into sustainable management of natural resources.
When the MCC began as an idea that the President put forward several years ago, it was a very innovative idea, but I have to say that the connection between the proposal and natural resource management and the environment was unstated or perhaps even unclear, and as a result of input by many of the individuals around this room in the broader conservation and environmental community working with the Congress that the statute that has now authorized the Millennium Challenge Corporation integrates environmental themes very clearly into the heart of the mission of the corporation.
Under Paul Applegarth's leadership, the MCC staff has put together some very concrete and interesting ideas about how to ensure that the program of the MCC advances natural resource management and promotes environmentally sound development.
So it is particularly gratifying to be here and to help address these complex questions. I know that the MCC staff and its leadership are very interested in the views of the conservation and environmental community and will be taking your thoughts here today into account as they try and address their policies.
So, with that, I would like to turn immediately to Governor Whitman and to the CEO of the MCC, Paul Applegarth, for their introductory remarks to help set the policy context for our work today.
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