Roots in Analysis
USDA posted its first employee abroad in 1882, with assignment of Edmund J. Moffat to London. Moffat went out as a "statistical agent" of USDA's Division of Statistics but with the status of Deputy Consul General on the roster of the Department of State at London. Subsequent USDA officials assigned overseas, however, did not enjoy diplomatic or consular status. This impeded their work, which at that point consisted mainly of collecting, analyzing, and transmitting to Washington time-sensitive market information on agricultural commodities.
Creation of a series of units in Washington to analyze foreign competition and demand for agricultural commodities was paralleled by assignment abroad of agricultural statistical agents, commodity specialists, and "agricultural commissioners". The analytical unit in Washington, supervised by Leon Estabrook, deputy chief of USDA's Bureau of Agricultural Economics, compiled publications based on reports from the USDA's overseas staff, U.S. consuls abroad, and data collected by the Rome-based International Institute of Agriculture.
In 1924, USDA officials Nils Olsen and Louis Guy Michael, working with Congressman John Ketcham, began drafting legislation to create an agricultural attaché service with diplomatic status. Though this legislation passed the House of Representatives multiple times, it did not pass the Senate until 1930, in part due to opposition from then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover. Hoover, however, eventually supported the legislation in order to garner support of the farm bloc during his presidential campaign. Accordingly, the Foreign Agricultural Service was created by the Foreign Agricultural Service Act of 1930 (46 Stat. 497), which President Herbert Hoover signed into law June 5, 1930.
The law stipulated that the Foreign Agricultural Service consist of the overseas officials of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA also created a Foreign Agricultural Service Division within the Bureau of Agricultural Economics to serve as the FAS's headquarters staff in Washington, D.C., naming Asher Hobson, a noted economist and political scientist, as its first head. The 1930 Act explicitly granted the USDA's overseas officials diplomatic status and the right to the diplomatic title attaché. In short order, FAS posted additional staff overseas, to Marseille, Pretoria, Belgrade, Sydney, and Kobe, in addition to existing staff in London, Buenos Aires, Berlin and Shanghai. In Washington, Dr. Hobson hired a Russian émigré, Dr. Lazar Volin, as the agency's first domestically based regional analyst, to specialize in the study of Russia as a competitor to U.S. agriculture.
Read more about this topic: Foreign Agricultural Service
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