overseas are still at a fairly early stage, but support to date has included both direct aid to such organizations and indirect assistance through well-established intermediary groups. All our overseas offices are working with community development groups to some extent; the most extensive activity now taking place is in India, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Mexico.

Another promising area of transnational programming is water management. In developing countries, efforts to improve the food supply, to increase employment, and to alleviate poverty all depend on the presence and the equitable distribution of water. For some years, Foundation staff have been working in several places overseas, particularly in South and Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, to develop new ways to operate irrigation systems for maximum economic and health benefit to the poor. In the Philippines, for example, the Foundation has been working with the National Irrigation Administration and with local user associations to improve both the efficiency and the fairness of local irrigation-management systems. More recently, we have begun to focus on water problems in the United States, particularly in the West. There, increasing competition for water is threatening the access of poorer farmers to that vital but limited resource—a situation not unlike that faced by many farmers in India, the Philippines, and Bangladesh. In the United States, as in many developing countries, insufficient attention to efficient water distribution methods threatens to result, or is already resulting, in waterlogging and salinity from overwatering in some areas and in others the return of drought conditions reminiscent of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The Foundation recently launched an intensified water-management effort in the United States that should benefit from the insights gained in our water-management programs abroad; grants this year went to such organizations as the Conservation Foundation, the John Muir Institute, the National Governors' Association, and the Center for Rural Affairs. As our U.S. activities expand over the next few years, we expect to increase support for other resource-management programs with analogues in our programs abroad, such as efforts to improve the use of marginal and degraded land.

The problems of refugees and migrants call for approaches that range from the local to the transnational. It has been estimated that the number of refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and safe-haven seekers worldwide now exceeds thirty million people—ten million of them refugees from political, social, or environmental upheavals in their home countries. Population flows across national borders are likely to continue, placing enormous strains on the social and economic fabric of receiving countries. This year, the Foundation launched an expanded effort on behalf of the world's refugees and migrants that is being carried out by three of the Foundation's programs—International Affairs, Human Rights and Social Justice, and Urban Poverty. The initiative includes support for studies of the effects of population flows on sending and receiving countries and on