Kyle Kellams: We’ve discussed the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in this space over the past couple of weeks. CPB isn’t the only agency or service to experience a dramatic change in federal funding in 2025. One of the first to undergo massive reductions was the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.
If you navigate to the USAID website, you’ll find a seven-sentence notice of administrative leave messaging and nothing more. When the massive cutbacks were first being discussed in February of this year, we took time to look back at some of the past relationships between USAID and Arkansas. It was for an edition of our prior Center Profile series that we have every Monday with Randy Dixon.
On today’s edition of Ozarks at Large, we’re listening to that conversation once again.
“I love the concept, but they turn out to be radical left lunatics. The concept of it is good, but it’s all about the people.”
Kellams: All right, Randy Dixon with the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, that got us kicked off for this week. What do we hear?
Randy Dixon: Well, that was President Donald J. Trump last week talking about USAID. We’ve been hearing a lot about that. It’s been in the news, still in the news, changing daily. In case you don’t know, that’s the United States Agency for International Development. So what is it? What do they do? Why do they have a target on their back? That’s what we’re going to look at here.
Kellams: And let me also say that as you mentioned, this is a story that’s changing daily. We’re recording this on Friday for broadcast on Monday. In 2025, a 48- to 72-hour gap between record and broadcast can mean a lot happens.
Dixon: We’re not trying to give you the latest news. We just want to let you know what they do and how they’re connected to Arkansas — which they actually are.
According to websites — not the USAID website, because it’s down; it was taken down the week before — USAID is the principal U.S. agency to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms. But according to the president, it’s a department full of corruption and reckless overspending. Here’s a clip from White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt:
‘Here’s the reason why Elon Musk and others have been taking a look. If you look at the waste and abuse that has run through USAID over the past several years, these are some of the insane priorities that that organization has been spending money on: $1.5 million to advance in Serbia’s workplaces; $70,000 for a production of a musical in Ireland; $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia; $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru. I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap, and I know the American people don’t either. That’s exactly what Elon Musk has been tasked by President Trump to do — to get the fraud, waste, and abuse out of our federal government.’”
Kellams: All right, so this is a segment dedicated to the history of Arkansas.
Dixon: There is a connection between USAID and Arkansas in the KATV archives, believe it or not. In my earlier days at KATV as executive producer, I would travel with crews and produce stories — sometimes some of the bigger stories that we covered. A couple of those, I traveled with reporter Steve Powell and photographer Tim Hamilton to several places around the world and with other crews. But it was with Winrock International, the Arkansas-based nonprofit. It is heavily funded by USAID.
So let me play a couple of examples of programs they have that weren’t mentioned earlier. This first one, we literally traveled across the world to look at an agricultural program based in Nepal. Here is a portion of Steve Powell’s report.
“This is a tiny village in southern Nepal, in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains. There isn’t much more to this town than the gravel road I’m walking on, but the population is a little bigger today because someone important is in this primitive classroom.
‘My name is Ed Levi from Arkansas. I want to tell you I’m happy to be here, that I was here before, and I never forgot you. I was anxious to come back.’
“He doesn’t speak the language, and his hometown of Mountain View, Arkansas, is on the other side of the world. Yet they’ve walked hours to hear him. They will follow him wherever he goes. In short, this visit from Ed Levi has this village buzzing.
“And we open the hive gently. This is the kind of help beekeeper Ed Levi is offering — hands-on, and in his line of work, that’s not always easy.
‘It’s real hard for them to get technical assistance here. That’s where Farmer to Farmer comes in.’
“Farmer to Farmer is the program responsible for bringing Ed together with these brand new beekeepers. It’s run by Winrock International. Farmers like Ed volunteer their time, and Winrock pays the way. Before Ed’s initial trip here, these farmers knew little about bees and honey. But now, with just a little guidance, the mountains seem to be breaking out in hives.
‘The number of bees and hives they have has more than doubled, and they’ve created a market.’
“According to Winrock Farmer to Farmer director David Norman, Ed’s experience is repeated the world over, with hundreds of volunteers working on other agricultural projects.”
‘Most people who commit the time to do these projects usually come back with a great feeling about going someplace and helping other people that they never expected when they got on the plane to go.’
“Ed will go back home soon to his own problems, but it’s unlikely they’ll seem quite so imposing after Nepal.”
‘I go back to the States and sometimes I wonder, how can anybody be unhappy? We have so much there, and they’re happy with so little.’
“Happier now, though, with just a little bit more, Steve Powell, Channel 7 News.”
Kellams: When you introduced that cut, I was watching your face. You could instantly go back to that village in Nepal.
Dixon: Oh, you remember it. It’s burned into my memory. It was quite a program.
Now, you could argue, why do we care about a small village full of beekeepers on the other side of the world? Is that a smart way to spend money? That’s not for the two of us to decide. But I talked to Steve Powell, and I asked him — all politics aside — why do you think it was important for Channel 7 to tell this story?
“We thought it was important to tell the story of these Arkansans, and specifically Winrock International, and show the impact we’re making in these far-off places around the world. We had an opportunity to go to Nepal. We had an opportunity to go to Peru — to places where they don’t have exposure to Americans at all, much less Arkansans — and to see the work they’re doing in these small villages, where they have so many insurmountable problems to just live a life that most of us Americans would even be familiar with, and how they’re making a difference in their lives. I think they were important stories to tell and continue to be important stories to tell.”
Kellams: And that’s a conversation with your former reporter, Steve Powell, that happened recently.
Dixon: That’s last week. And in this interview, you heard he mentioned Peru. That was another program that works directly with USAID. It’s called Farmer to Farmer. In this case, Winrock was teaching farmers in Peru how to grow crops other than coca — which you turn into cocaine — which floods into the United States. Here’s part of that story.
“As the rainy season draws closer, a layer of thick white clouds envelops the Andes Mountains, hiding much more than the Peruvian jungle below. There are stories hidden here — stories of drugs, of terror, and finally of hope.
“Poverty lives in the upper Rimac River Valley. Finding the necessities of life is the primary occupation of anyone lucky enough to get past childhood. The hard, weathered faces of the people here are proof of hard lives and of a still harder lesson: you do indeed reap what is sown.
“Coca is what has been sown here. A plant that easily blends into the hillsides it clings to. Its single distinguishing feature is its ominous potential. The odds are good this plain little leaf will wind up on a city street somewhere across the United States, transformed into crack or cocaine.
“Growing coca here is illegal, but these farmers are hardly greedy drug lords. Their goal is simply survival. That is how Winrock International hopes to affect change — by providing the tools and know-how to grow other crops like pineapple, coffee, or rice that will yield the same income as the illicit coca.
“It is not an easy sell, and it’s not just coca’s profit potential that Winrock must combat. It is a decade reign of terror when this part of Peru was ruled by narco traffickers.
“Dr. Plunkett is a Fort Smith native who works for USAID, a government agency coordinating groups like Winrock. He says these drug terrorists gave farmers just two options:
‘The way the narco traffickers approached them, they said, grow coca and we’ll give you something for it. And oh, by the way, if you don’t grow it, we’ll kill you.’
“Now, for every field Winrock can convert to those safer alternatives, it means less cocaine on the streets. In fact, for every 500 acres taken out of coca production, there is one less metric ton of cocaine on the market.”
Kellams: I mentioned earlier that your face let me know you remember being in Nepal. It sounds like Steve remembers being in Peru.
Dixon: Oh, like it was yesterday. Those kinds of stories make an impression on you. Steve remembers it like it was yesterday. Here’s a comment from him.”
“We met a man whose brother was killed by narco terrorists. They delivered his head to his home in a taxicab because he refused to grow coca leaves. That’s absolutely terrifying. But because of the work Winrock was doing at the time, converting these acres of coca leaves to something more benign like chocolate or coffee, they were taking cocaine off the streets here in America. It’s a positive impact on the supply side of the drug war, at a relatively low cost. They weren’t handing off bags of money to these farmers. They were teaching them a skill to transition from growing coca leaves to something much more productive in the world.”
Kellams: So you also have some history about USAID.
Dixon: That’s right. It was created in 1961 by President John Kennedy. It was formed to combat the spread of communism during the Cold War. It was a goodwill gesture to underdeveloped countries in the world.
Kellams: To win them over as opposed to communist countries.
Dixon: It actually improved the image of the United States. Over the decades, it’s evolved into a resource for some countries to supply basic human needs to their people, and also to train people. I guess people may wonder, is this any of our business? Do we need to be involved with this? Do we need to be the world’s watchdog? Who knows.
Kellams: But it’s been a debate going on for a couple of centuries, really.
Dixon: Steve Powell poses this simple question:
“The other thing, Randy, is, and it’s a question we probably should ask ourselves as one of the richest countries in the world and the largest, most diverse economy in the world — do we have a moral obligation to help our fellow man when they can’t help themselves? I don’t have an answer to that question, but I think it’s worth asking.”
Dixon: All right, so the latest that I’ve been able to know — we’ve tried to contact, of course, there’s no one to contact at USAID. Winrock, we’ve not been able to get a response from.
Kellams: Ditto. Our reporter Daniel Carruth is working on a contemporary story about this, and he’s heard many of the agencies he’s contacted have not returned calls.
Dixon: Right. I think that’s because they’re in such turmoil. That’s changing daily. But I checked Winrock’s annual report from 2023 — the latest they have. According to that, Winrock International received almost $72 million from USAID in 2023. According to my math, that’s about 35% of their entire funding for the year. So there will definitely be changes, and some may have already come out in the news over the weekend. Again, you and I are talking on Friday for this segment to air on Monday. We’ll have to see what shakes out.
Kellams: What’s interesting is how so many of the archives from KATV, now housed digitally with the Pryor Center, connect to so many different things.
Dixon: That’s right. When all this came up, I was driving into work listening to NPR and USAID came up, and I remembered, wait a minute — two of those stories. I want to point out these were done in the late ’90s and early 2000s, between 1998 and 2002. So these are about 20 to 25 years old.
Kellams: All right, Randy Dixon is with the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. We’ll connect to something else next week.
That visit with Randy Dixon from the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History first aired on Ozarks at Large this February. You can hear conversations with Randy Dixon when he brings in archives from the Pryor Center every Monday, right here on Ozarks at Large.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue.
