Federal Workers Speak
Kate McDonald Polakiewicz U.S. Agency for International Development
Kate McDonald Polakiewicz worked at United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the Bureau for Resilience, Environment and Food Security in the Center for Agriculture as a Program Analyst. She had been with the bureau for nearly five years when the USAID stop-work orders were issued at the end of January, 2025. Her contract was terminated in March, 2025. She shared with us the nature and impact of her work with international agricultural assistance and her motivation for entering this field.
I had the opportunity to travel a lot from a young age with my family. When I was 12, my parents took my brother and me out of school, and we traveled to 25 countries in 13 months. When I came back to the United States, I realized there's such a big world out there, bigger than my Southern California bubble. From then on, I wanted to study all things international. I did my bachelor's in Global Studies and during my undergrad studies discovered agriculture. I'm not from a farming background, so I can't exactly explain why, but I just really gravitated to it, I think, because of the understanding that food is so critical for all of humanity. We all eat. We all depend on it. I later pursued a master’s degree in International Agricultural Development from UC Davis.
When I joined the Bureau in 2020, our work in food security involved nutrition, resilience, agriculture, and water as primary technical areas, and we approached solving the very complex issue of food insecurity in developing countries by working across all of these areas. In the Center for Agriculture, we worked in an innovative way, bringing together many different sectors and different agencies within the U.S. government and international governments to tackle these large issues. This included partnerships with the private sector.
I worked in our coffee sector programming and had the opportunity to build relationships between the U.S. government and the private sector. The private sector is concerned with protecting the global supply of coffee, and at USAID, we too were interested in the long-term viability of coffee. We were especially focused on improving the livelihoods of millions of at-risk smallholder coffee producers around the world and maintaining the value of the coffee industry for the U.S. economy. This work received strong bipartisan support, particularly from senators who recognized the coffee industry as a significant driver of income and job creation in their states.
One of the first and foremost issues we were trying to tackle in the coffee sector is climate change. Coffee is very susceptible to climate because it needs specific conditions to grow. Coffee-growing regions face mounting threats from climate change, including more frequent drought, frost events, and increased pest pressure. It’s also very labor intensive. We don’t grow coffee in the United States, apart from a small amount of coffee grown in Hawaii and in California. Most of the world’s coffee is grown in developing countries where climate change is really affecting production. At USAID we worked on creating a more sustainable production model for growing coffee by supporting economic development that made it possible for coffee farmers to continue farming in their home countries. By doing so, we were lessening the pressure on U.S. borders from irregular migration, from Central America specifically.
The private sector came to USAID saying that the challenges around coffee production are not something that any one actor can solve alone. The private sector needed the involvement of the U.S. government. USAID had so much experience with relationship-building and in partnering with other governments, including those in major coffee exporting countries. The crisis facing coffee production is an all-hands-on-deck problem requiring strategic public-private partnership. When USAID was shuttered, we had recently launched a new program focused in part on breeding climate-resilient varieties. It’s a real shame that, after all the investment that went into establishing partnerships and projects like these on the ground over many years, they were cut off so abruptly without our being able to see the impacts that they could have continued to make.
My main work, in addition to being the point of contact for the coffee sector in my Bureau, was managing Farmer-to-Farmer, a program that has been funded since 1985 through the Farm Bill. This was a short-term technical assistance program that placed U.S. farmers with farmer organizations in developing countries to generate rapid, sustained growth in the agricultural sector. Volunteers came from all 50 U.S. states.
Farmer-to-Farmer was similar to the Peace Corps in that it sent American volunteers to other countries to create cultural exchange, to give somebody who had never met an American before an opportunity to meet someone from the United States, and vice versa. Through the Farmer-to-Farmer Program, USAID brought the expertise of American agricultural volunteers to solve challenges in agriculture and food security. From 1985 until the program was closed, we fielded more than 22,000 volunteers. We were in 117 countries, and we assisted more than two and a half million agricultural professionals. Through this work, we impacted 178 million beneficiaries. The program was one of our most longstanding, successful, and well known.
Farmer-to-Farmer provided the opportunity to showcase the best of America in terms of our modern agricultural systems and knowledge. This gave the farmers who participated an individual sense of mission and gave them humility too, to see how other people live. Lasting friendships were made between people in the U.S. and other countries. That cultural exchange is so important. It gives you a whole new perspective on your own reality and how the U.S. fits in with the rest of the world. It also creates compassion and a respect for humanity.
I was disappointed, to say the least, when USAID was shut down and I didn't experience more members of Congress standing up for this program. There is some language in the draft of the new Farm Bill to reinstate something like Farmer-to-Farmer, but it’s unclear whether it will pass. For now, it’s just not continuing.
My work at USAID always felt like compelling, important work. I really respected the people I worked with. We were so careful not to waste taxpayer dollars that sometimes it was to our own detriment, because our oversight processes were so complex and so stringent. I was inspired by the caliber of people I worked with every day, the cohort of humanitarians who were tackling some of the world's most challenging problems through such a compassionate and brilliant viewpoint. For the past year I've just been feeling somewhat lost, because there's nothing really that I've been able to find that calls to me like what I was doing before. It's hard to reconcile, and it's hard to move on, because the whole situation was so unjust. There’s not a lot of closure to it.
The U.S. was spending less than one percent of GDP on foreign assistance. What each American spent in taxes on foreign assistance on an annual basis was about $36.00 a year. The bang for the buck was huge. USAID was doing so much with such a small per capita amount. If you look at what we as a nation are spending on defense and immigration enforcement, it’s wild to me that we’re okay with this, and we were not okay with spending $36.00 per capita per year to improve millions of people's lives throughout the world. If people had the opportunity to see firsthand what they were spending $36.00 per year on, it would be a no brainer.
Since the closing of USAID, Kate has returned to civil service as the Assistant Director of Agricultural Development with New York State's Department of Agriculture and Markets. She’s working “much more locally” now but hopes someday to return to international work. She lives in Buffalo, NY with her husband and young children.