You may have noticed a lot of increased talk about “food security” lately, particularly in the international development realm. There’s good reason for that.
A family stands beside their harvested rice. USAID developed the infrastructure to make this lowland flooding possible, facilitated these farmers’ access to input credit, and has delivered production and marketing technical assistance to the producers. As a result, families benefit from improved food security and increased income from sales of surplus grains. Photo by Ryan Vroegindewey, USAID/Mali
Yet global hunger and chronic malnutrition remain two of the greatest development challenges today. Nearly 20 percent of all people in the world live on less than $1.25 a day, and almost one billion suffer from chronic hunger. Compounding this problem is the fact that, by 2050, the global population is expected to grow to more than nine billion people, requiring up to a 70 percent increase in agricultural production to feed us all. Given increasingly limited natural resources, we’ll also need to produce this additional food with less land, water, and other resources.
The challenge is indeed great, but there are opportunities for solutions. An estimated 75 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, where farming can be a key economic driver. Because growth in agriculture is, on average, at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as growth in other sectors, we already know that investments in agricultural development are fundamental to alleviating hunger and propelling long-term economic growth.
The time to accelerate these investments and growth is now. The G-8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy and the World Food Summit in Rome in 2009 united the global community to intensify efforts to advance food security by scaling up investment in the agricultural sector, which had been suffering from extreme underinvestment for several years. Feed the Future is the United States’ contribution to this collaborative global effort, which is centered on country-owned processes to improve food security, agricultural production, nutrition, trade, and broad-based economic growth through development of the agricultural sector. We’ve made a lot of progress, as a recent report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has noted. But we’re only just getting started.
Three years after L’Aquila, the leaders of the G-8 are preparing to meet once again, this time at the 2012 G-8 Summit at Camp David on May 19. This Summit is expected to build upon the food and nutrition successes of L’Aquila by focusing on creating a better environment to mobilize private sector investment as a catalyst for long-term economic growth. Through the collective engagement of international donors, country governments, the private sector, the NGO community, and civil society organizations, we can help break the cycle of hunger and poverty so that countries can feed themselves, helping their communities to thrive. This work is important because it translates to a healthy, prosperous, and sustainable future for us all.
A significant proportion of food does not enter formal value chains.
If we are determined to “break the the cycle of hunger and poverty so that countries can feed themselves, helping their communities to thrive. ” then private sector investment needs to be coupled to informal as well as formal value chains so that post harvest sorting, drying and storage of crops used in the informal sector improves too.
If we also believe that “This work is important because it translates to a healthy, prosperous, and sustainable future for us all.” then we need to see how that private sector investment underpins food safety as well as increase production and reduce waste. The partnership for Aflatoxin Control – launched in Addis Abbaba and embeded in CADDP on 1st Nov 2012 – is an initiaitive that needs to gain profile as part of the focus on food security and nutrition. With thanks, Andrew.