Chapter 4

The United States responds directly to hunger and malnutrition in the developing world with food aid and agricultural development assistance

The U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) treat hunger and poverty as interdependent problems. The first MDG—dramatically reducing hunger and poverty—measures progress against hunger by gauging how many children remain chronically undernourished.

Mozambique is a southern African country of 23 million people, most of whom (81 percent) live below the international poverty threshold of $1.25 per day. In the Mozambican village of Cobue, Constantia and her family farm a small plot of maize and cassava. They are subsistence farmers who eat what they grow themselves. Most rural Mozambican farmers have neither fertilizer nor formal training in agricultural techniques or management. A hoe and machete are the tools of their trade.

In theory, food aid is distributed according to the needs of a targeted population, but usually it is distributed according to what is available. This falls short of meeting the nutrition needs of pregnant and lactating women, small children, and people with compromised health.

New food aid products are improving the health of those suffering from both moderate and severe levels of malnutrition. Probably the best known is Plumpy’nut, developed by the French company Nutriset. Plumpy’nut has garnered a great deal of attention in the mainstream media; it’s sometimes called a “miracle drug” for its ability to bring children wasted from malnutrition back from the brink of death. A recent study in Niger showed that feeding Plumpy’nut to severely malnourished children under age 2 was associated with a reduction in mortality of roughly 50 percent.

Veronica lives in the village of Ngofi in Mozambique, where families live on what they grow on their farms. She, her husband Marcos, and their four children had a herd of goats; they were wealthier than most of their neighbors since goats are worth 400 pounds of maize each.

U.S. food aid passes through three stages between farmers and food aid recipients. Each offers opportunities to improve efficiency, thus enabling the program to provide higher-quality foods and/or serve more people.

Improving the nutritional quality of U.S food aid is a daunting challenge in the context of a shrinking federal budget. Cost will significantly affect how quickly U.S. food aid can be changed to better meet the nutritional needs of the most vulnerable groups. Bulk commodities and unfortified cereal products cost less per ton than fortified or processed foods with enhanced nutritional value. Yet efforts to strengthen nutritional status, particularly those that supply people with more micronutrients, yield an extraordinarily high return on investment: they enable people to live longer, more productive lives.

Not all U.S. food aid is distributed directly to hungry people. Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of food aid is “monetized”—sold in recipient country markets for cash to pay for development projects. The practice started in the 1980s and has grown steadily. It has been used primarily to improve long-term food security—for example, providing technical training to farmers or improving the infrastructure farmers need to gain access to markets.

“We will design and implement programs that enable the rural poor to participate in and contribute to food security,” reads the Feed the Future Guide, the initiative’s official implementation strategy. The guide describes Feed the Future’s goals; what stands out are the “two key objectives of accelerating inclusive agriculture sector growth and improving nutritional status.”

Continued U.S. support for Feed the Future is a vital part of helping Mozambique build stronger local economies and stronger families. Read more to find out how U.S.-Mozambique relationships facilitated by Feed the Future between have helped Ikuru and other agriculture businesses prosper.

The world is not producing enough food to keep pace with increasing demand.⁵⁰ There is no doubt that this is everyone’s problem: the consequences of failing to solve it will affect us all. Nothing fuels global instability like hungry people taking their frustration to the streets of capital cities, as we’ve seen in recent years when food prices spiked.