U.S. Leadership in the Fight against Hunger and Malnutrition

Feed the Future will be operating within a broader movement: rich and poor countries alike support making more assistance available for smallholder farmers and for improvements in maternal and child nutrition. The surge in food prices in 2007-2008 and the unprecedented rise in hunger that followed galvanized many countries to focus on smallholder agriculture. The crisis focused attention on the root causes of hunger and malnutrition; and those roots led straight to rural areas and families struggling to get by on subsistence agriculture.

Feed the Future, by its own description, aims to “strengthen collaboration with the international community, including other bilateral donors, multilateral development banks, and other international organizations.”¹ If the initiative lives up to this pledge, it will be extraordinarily different from most U.S. bilateral assistance programs, which partner primarily with U.S.-based private contractors and NGOs.

Since 2000, the United States has increased official development assistance by about 10 percent a year.² However, the share of U.S. assistance channeled through multilateral institutions has fallen by 11 percent over the same period.³ Some of the advantages of making U.S. development assistance available through multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank’s concessional lending arm, the International Development Association, and the specialized agencies of the United Nations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and UNICEF, include pooling resources and reducing the transaction costs associated with bilateral aid; taking advantage of a wider assortment of technical experts; sharing knowledge and lessons learned with other donors; committing to multi-year programs; and finally liberating assistance from domestic politics.

Tonglewin (Liberia) village elder Kou Pealea is a midwife. Ninety-nine percent of deaths in pregnancy and childbirth occur in the developing world, reflecting the “urgent need for skilled health workers, particularly midwives,” according to the World Health Organization.

The response of the U.S. government to the global food and financial crises has been marked by a growing appreciation that to tackle today’s increasingly interconnected challenges we need a new set of multilateral tools. President Bush convened the first G20 Summit in Washington in November 2008 to address the worst global economic recession since the Great Depression and President Obama’s leadership at the G8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy in 2009, led to the L’Aquila Global Food Security Initiative. Now the United States has stepped forward to lead the 1,000 Days Campaign, launched by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Irish counterpart in New York in September 2010, to address the urgency of maternal and child malnutrition.

When the United States leads, other countries know that more resources are likely to become available—the country’s role as the largest donor makes it possible to leverage commitments from others. And that makes it possible to do things that weren’t possible before—for example, agree to significant debt relief for the poorest countries or make real progress through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. A multi-donor trust fund managed by the World Bank, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), is an example of how U.S. commitments have leveraged additional resources from other partners to create a multilateral instrument that will complement U.S. bilateral investments in Feed the Future.

The challenges of the 21st century are increasingly global in nature. To effectively manage these challenges, the United States has an important role to play in forging new ways to work with other nations. Because international cooperation is needed now more than ever, it is essential to build and strengthen multilateral institutions and mechanisms to identify and begin to solve global problems.

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