Feed the Future

In the mid-1980s USAID directly employed 221 agricultural development officers. By 2010 the number had dropped by roughly 90 percent, paralleling the steep decline of the agency’s budgets for agriculture and food security. Retirements vastly exceeded the number of new hires, and those who entered USAID as agricultural officers soon realized where the opportunities for advancement and programmatic impact did not lie and moved into other fields within the agency.

In the 1960s and 1970s, USAID was one of the most respected development agencies in the world, and it was a respect earned by having technically qualified staff to respond to the most difficult development challenges of the day. Starting in the 1980s, a transition occurred to change a respected organization of “doers” into one of “managers,” as one USAID official put it.

When President Obama stood with world leaders at the G-8 Summit in Italy to launch the L’Aquila Global Food Security Initiative, he emphasized that developing countries should have control over how the resources would be used. At a post-meeting press conference, he explained: “The purpose of aid must be…to help people become self-sufficient, provide for their families, and lift their standards of living. And that’s why I proposed a new approach to this issue—one endorsed by all the leaders here—a coordinated effort to support comprehensive plans created by the countries themselves, with help from multilateral institutions like the World Bank when appropriate.”

Entering a therapeutic feeding center for the first time is unsettling. Therapeutic feeding centers are for young children suffering from severe malnutrition. Three staff from Bread for the World Institute visited such a center in rural Ethiopia at the height of the “hungry season,” the period before the next harvest when food is most scarce. The center was a few hundred kilometers from Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa, and it was a Spartan environment. The room where the children were treated was bare except for blankets spread across the concrete floor. There were a dozen children there that day, their mothers sitting beside them. They had carried their children here on foot, some walking from more than 10 miles away.

Almost immediately after an earthquake hit Haiti on January 12, 2010, it was clear this was a humanitarian disaster on a breathtaking scale. An estimated 230,000 people were killed and the capital city of Port-au-Prince, close to the epicenter, was almost completely destroyed. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies described the earthquake as “the biggest natural disaster in history.”

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.

The development challenges in a country like Haiti are enormous: the highest malnutrition rate in the Western Hemisphere, a third of newborn babies underweight, and an estimated 2.4 million chronically food-insecure people in a population of 9 million. These were the conditions in Haiti even before the devastating earthquake of January 10, 2010.

Bread for the World President David Beckmann, in testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2009, said that the then recently-proposed Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, before it was named Feed the Future, “is remarkable for its vision. It recognizes that a comprehensive strategy to address hunger must go beyond simply increasing agricultural production, and that improving maternal and child nutrition is a central component of the administration’s plan. Focusing our agriculture and food security investments on improving the nutrition of women and children will shape better, more targeted programs that have a lasting development impact.”

“The United States has always stood for big ideas,” explained Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) to colleagues on the floor of the Senate when he introduced the Global Food Security Act of 2009. “From the founding of the Republic on the basis of freedom to President Kennedy’s vow to put a man on the moon,” he continued, “one of today’s big ideas should be the eradication of hunger.”

In some countries, women lack the right to own land, are regarded legally as minors, and cannot get a bank loan without the approval of a male relative. If a woman’s husband dies, she could lose all the assets she’s accumulated during the marriage. To continue farming the land she and her husband held, and to feed her children, she may have to marry one of her husband’s male relatives.