Karen S. Sliter
Professional Achievement Award
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, 1991
Karen S. Sliter has helped ensure that U.S. farmers can sell chickens to Russia and apples to Mexico. She has implemented part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and she has played a significant role in efforts to rid Jamaica of flesh-eating screwworms and Africa of deadly tsetse flies.
She has accomplished all that and more during a 14-year career with the International Services arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which she joined in 1992.
"I know of no graduate of our college who has had a greater impact on international agriculture than Dr. Karen Shank Sliter," said Dr. John E. Hubbell, OSU Professor of Veterinary Anesthesiology. "She has done so while maintaining remarkable life balance and serving as a role model and mentor to the next generation of veterinarians."
Sliter's first job with APHIS was as a field veterinarian in Michigan. She then took a job in Washington, D.C., where she began to work in animal health trade issues. She received a Department of Agriculture Group Honor Award for Excellence for her role in decade-long negotiations in which she twice helped restore U.S. access to the Russian poultry market, valued at $600 million annually.
Sliter became one of about 20 veterinarians in the U.S. Foreign Service when she was appointed diplomat and international trade specialist in Mexico City in 1996. There, she was responsible for animal health issues between the U.S. and Mexico, including implementation of the animal and plant health aspects of NAFTA. She also was a member of the negotiation team that resolved three $100 million markets for U.S. exporters to Mexico: apples, rendered products, and poultry.
In 2000, Sliter was promoted to diplomat and area director for Central and Eastern Europe in Vienna, where she managed trade, animal health, and plant health issues in 36 countries. From 2000 to 2005, she was accredited to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and served as the official APHIS representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for the United Nations. In that job she lobbied the agency to continue financial and technical support for screwworm eradication in Jamaica. Screwworms eat living flesh in humans and animals and are a significant agricultural pest that could cause an estimated $844 million annual loss if they ever infested the U.S. agricultural market.
Another IAEA project was to eradicate tsetse flies from Africa. Tsetse flies transmit the disease known as sleeping sickness and make it impossible for thousands of Africans to use fertile valleys for raising livestock. Sliter is credited with helping convince the African Development Bank to spend $69 million to fund an effort to wipe out the flies.
In 2005, Sliter was promoted to diplomat and regional director for South America in Santiago, where she manages an agricultural trade portfolio that was worth $1.9 billion for the U.S. in exports and $6.1 billion in U.S. imports in 2004. She recently negotiated the establishment of a plant health risk analysis center that will open new agricultural markets for Columbian farmers and give them viable agricultural alternatives to drug production.
