At a time when policymakers are called on to defend every line in the national budget, the United States and other developed countries have pledged to invest resources and political will in fighting global hunger and malnutrition. The timing speaks volumes for how seriously world leaders take hunger and malnutrition as threats to global stability and the common good.
But without international cooperation on other global problems, these investments are at risk. Everything Feed the Future and other international efforts are hoping to achieve in the near term could be wiped out by climate change in a few decades or less. People in sub-Saharan Africa will suffer some of the worst effects because so many rely on agriculture for their livelihood. By 2020—in less than 10 years—farmers in some African countries could see their crop yields reduced by as much as 50 percent as the result of persistent drought.
The collapse of negotiations on a climate change treaty, the breakdown in the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks, and the fact that many of the issues contributing to the 2007-08 rise in food prices have not been adequately addressed mean that poor people remain vulnerable despite the new plans and investments in agriculture and nutrition. In 2011 and beyond, the international community must find ways to extend the political will we now see dedicated to reducing hunger and malnutrition to complementary issues where there is as yet little or no meaningful coordination and effort.
With Feed the Future, the United States is not only in step with the rest of the international community on fighting hunger and malnutrition, but leading. To develop the initiative, the U.S. government went through a rigorous consultation process with U.S. civil society groups, including Bread for the World—in the process, it demonstrated that the United States will adhere to the same standards it expects of partner governments in developing countries. Feed the Future’s embrace of country-led development shows other donors that with this initiative, the United States is committed to best practices in international development. The emphasis on bottom-up approaches using local community expertise tells poor and hungry people that the United States stands with them in this initiative.
U.S. leadership may not decide the fate of every hungry child, but we should not understate how much it means either. When the United States leads, other countries know that overall resource commitments will be higher. The influence of the United States as the largest donor makes it possible to leverage commitments from others. We’ve seen this before many times, from debt relief, to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to the more recent establishment of the World Bank’s multi-donor trust fund, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP). In each case, the United States stepped up its commitments and so did other donors, all of which made it possible to do things that weren’t possible before.
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 working together with other nations. With international cooperation needed now more than ever, building and strengthening international institutions to address global problems is essential.
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