Hunger-Undernutrition Blog

Obama Administration's Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative

The US Government has unveiled the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, which was highlighted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative.  The Initiative, which is a foreign policy priority for the Obama Administration, is a comprehensive, multi-sectoral approach to tackle food security issues, and incorporates the need to improve agricultural infrastructure and outputs, combat malnutrition, and build community-based initiatives that work in a local context.

Details of how to operationalize the Initiative will be mapped out over the next few months. 

Your thoughts on what the Obama administration must account for, along with the sharing of best practices from those who are in the field, will be critical.  Feel free to post your comments here so we can consolidate and forward to our State Department contacts. You also can submit feedback directly by visiting http://www.state.gov/s/globalfoodsecurity  or e-mailing globalhunger@state.gov.

Jeffrey Sachs' Millennium Villages Partner with World Food Programme

As part of his ongoing effort to combat poverty and promote prosperous communities, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General, announced yesterday a new partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP) to cut hunger and malnutrition in African countries.

Sachs' Millennium Villages initiative is a bold and comprehensive approach to combat poverty at the village level through community-led development. 

“Millennium Villages will carry out the exciting interventions pioneered by WFP, and demonstrate that hunger and undernutrition can be cut decisively through proven measures in agriculture, school meals, nutritional supplementation, food-for-work programs to build infrastructure, and other powerful WFP tools," said Sachs.

Hunger and undernutrition remain an underlying cause of death for millions of children worldwide.  This new partnership aims to secure universal food and nutrition access in all Millennium Village schools, and support small-holder farms' crop productivity and economic outputs.

For a detailed recap of yesterday's UN press conference, check out the blog posting by Jessica Fanzo, Nutrition Coordinator for the Millennium Villages, on the You Are What You Eat Blog. 

President Clinton Announces New Commitments to Address Global Hunger and Undernutrition at CGI Meeting

This is the second in a series of posts by Sue Preziotti, reporting on the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) held in New York last week.

President Clinton announced new member commitments to directly combat the problems of global hunger and undernutrition during the closing plenary of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) on Friday, September 24.  According to CGI, 4.7 million children are expected to benefit from these malnutrition interventions, which include:

· The World Food Programme(WFP) announced a commitment to bring together key global, regional, and local private sector entities to undertake a five-year project to radically reduce malnutrition in a minimum of two countries in Asia. WFP will undertake an analysis of the gaps and implement country specific solutions including new product development, increased fortified foods, and improved processing technology and training.

 

· General Mills, PEPFAR, and USAID's Partnership for Food Security will link the technical and business expertise of General Mills experts with up to 200 small and medium-sized mills and food processors in sub-Saharan Africa, with the goal of improving the overall commercial viability of these enterprises and enhancing food production of nutritious food products for the world's most vulnerable populations.

· Freedom from Hunger will extend its Microfinance and Health Protection Initiative, building a consortium of practitioners, researchers, donors, and advocates to demonstrate that microfinance service providers can – and will – offer their clients health protection options. Five hundred or more microfinance service providers will offer health protection options to at least 2.5 million very poor clients in the developing world by 2014.

· PATH and its partners commit to improve the health of more than 800,000 schoolchildren in India by expanding their Ultra Rice meal fortification program. Increased demand for Ultra Rice and expected economies of scale will make the incremental cost of rice fortification more affordable to governments, better enabling them to improve the health of millions of malnourished schoolchildren.

· Growing Power commits to strengthen food security for school children and their caregivers in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Growing Power will build a new model of local food systems to ensure adequate nutrition in the short-term and build a long-term foundation for competitive African human capital in the global marketplace.

· AgroFrontera and Tres Ríos Agricultural Cooperative, with their partners, commit to work with 450 smallholder farmers and food companies to design and implement innovative food value chains that will improve capacity of smallholder farmer organizations in the impoverished northwest region of Dominican Republic to supply high quality food products to local, national, and international markets.

At the closing session, President Clinton announced that CGI members had made a total of 284 new commitments so far in 2009, which are valued at more than $9.4 billion dollars. The commitments, some of which were actually inspired at the meeting, are projected to improve more than 200 million lives through sustainable endeavors that bring new job opportunities, improved access to healthcare, access to safe drinking water, and much more.  http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/newsmedia/newsmedia_pressreleases_092509b.asp?Section=NewsMedia

 

Note: Everything posted on this blog is my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of my employer or its clients.

Clinton Global Initiative Kicks Off in NYC This Week: Presidents Clinton and Obama Give Opening Speeches

 

Written and submitted by Sue Preziotti, who is attending CGI 2009 on behalf of the Hunger-Undernutrition Blog. Stay tuned for more CGI posts from her this week.

Both President Barack Obama and President Bill Clinton cited the need to address global undernutrition and food security in remarks today at the opening of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York Cty.  
 
In a speech that covered a range of topics and emphasized individual service, President Obama noted that a solution to the nutrition challenges “can’t just be handouts of American food” but rather must include consideration of local resources, logistics and other factors in order to be sustainable.  
 
He emphasized that “change comes from the bottom up” and noted that his administration is re-evaluating policy and considering innovative ways to engage all sectors of society including businesses, NGO’s, faith-based organizations, and individuals to support local development programs around the world.  He also said there is a need for a "new spirit of global partnership."
 
The need for a model to address global undernutrition in a sustainable way has been noted on this blog.  A number of successful, groundbreaking strategies that may have applications to such a model, were touched upon by speakers at today’s opening session.  For example, Water.org has applied micro-financing to help local entrepreneurs and volunteers bring access to clean water to tens of thousands of people in developing countries.
 
The overriding theme was the continued fostering of collaboration among all sectors of society to develop and implement innovative solutions to the world's most pressing problems. 
 
President Clinton announced that this week’s CGI meeting would be attended by more than 60 current and former heads of state, 500 business leaders, and 400 leaders from nongovernmental and philanthropic organizations, representing 84 countries. 
 
President Obama closed the session saying that working together we can make a difference and address the challenges of our time.  Indeed, when President Obama and President Clinton are in a room together, you get the feeling that anything is possible.

 

The Complexities of Food Security and the Next Mandate of the Green Revolution

Yesterday's New York Times piece by Andrew Martin, "So Much Food.  So Much Hunger." highlights the challenges that stand in the way of food security and achieving the mandate of the Green Revolution, led by Nobel Laureate, Dr. Norman E. Borlaug.  

The piece reinforces why combating hunger is not simply about distributing seeds to sow, and food to fill bellies.  In fact, we need to look at programs from many lenses - policy, environmental, social, health, etc. - and levels and spheres of influence within a country. 

An integrated, well-thought out approach to fighting hunger is needed.  In my work, and that of many of my colleagues in this sphere, we keep seeing an over-emphasis on big international and national initiatives, and too little emphasis on understanding the implications of local realities ranging from physical access to food, to what local communities need and want. Why haven't we asked mothers what they believe, what they cook in their homes, where they get their food?  Why haven't we asked small-holder farmers what dynamics stand in the way of producing better quality food, and generating income from their efforts?

While national and international policies can determine an enabling environment for any development initiative, simply having good policies and high-level political will do not guarantee that programs will actually yield the type of impact that are desperately needed today.  Without local-level, community-based advocacy around, and ownership and trouble-shooting of, nutrition and food security efforts, we'll be making the same mistakes we've made in the past. We'll be prescribing a top-down approach that in the long-run doesn't work on its own.

Celebrating and Learning From Dr. Norman E. Borlaug - Father of the Green Revolution

Nobel Laureate, Dr. Norman E. Borlaug, who revolutionized agriculture and devoted his life to combating hunger, died on Saturday night in Dallas, Texas.  He was 95.

A tremendous loss for the agricultural and development world as a whole, Dr. Borlaug (or "Norm," as he was known to those closest) and his team of scientists based at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, are credited with increasing crop outputs through technology, infrastructure and novel farming approaches. Largely funded by The Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, these approaches fed millions of people around the world.  In 1970 Dr. Borlaug was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for his agricultural movement, which is known as the Green Revolution. 

Dr. Borlaug's vision of taking research and science to the fields to improve the livelihood of communities, and promote self-sufficiency, was counter to what international organizations viewed as the "correct" and "cost-effective" approach to development in the 1960s and '70s.  And, while his approach may have come under fire for issues ranging from the GMO debate to some feeling that the Green Revolution fell short of meeting its goals, Dr. Borlaug did account for country-specific needs and has given us valuable lessons to build upon.

The Green Revolution eventually became a global effort, but it is one of the first and perhaps best examples of development initiatives that began with a singular focus to bring about local change, one community and one country at a time, from ground up, to improve global outputs and outcomes.  This movement was defined by a rigorous discipline and evidence-based commitment, and is the laser-focused, solution-oriented, innovative spirit that we must embody today as we look to combat hunger and nutrition challenges around the world. 

After more than five decades of improving crop outputs and domestic access to food, the work of Dr. Borlaug and his team is more desperately needed today than ever before. In fact, a critical transformation is underway in how we combat hunger and define agricultural development. 

A few years ago, during a visit with Dr. Borlaug in his office at CIMMYT, I asked him about the impact of Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis on agricultural outputs.  He said that HIV/AIDS had destroyed the productive workforce in African communities, particularly in rural communities, and a powerful lesson had emerged. The HIV/AIDS crisis was a clear example that we cannot address one development challenge, in this case agriculture and food security, and ignore the impact that education, health, the environment and political will have on achieving goals.  These thoughts resonate loudly today.

The first few decades of the Green Revolution were concentrated on developing stronger and more diverse crop varieties, sharing knowledge and building on successes. That said, researchers at CIMMYT, and the other agriculture research centers, knew their underlying mandate was combating hunger.

Today, agricultural development needs to be deliberately and visibly framed in the broader context of economic, social, health, environmental and political implications, and how these spheres impact food production, and health and nutrition outcomes of communities. Those in the field of hunger and nutrition, whether it is the plant breeder or the community health worker, must work across sectors to build more integrated and sustainable models.  Agricultural development is not merely about building infrastructure and planting stronger wheat varieties.  It's about a lot more than that.

The Green Revolution's tactics were a means to an intended end. We have to remember that Dr. Borlaug set out to combat hunger, not simply increase crop yields.  He recognized that countries will be healthier and more prosperous if they are able to provide basic goods and services to their communities. 

As international bodies set out to support the next Green Revolution and commit to increased financing for farming and agricultural development, we should acknowledge that Dr. Borlaug and his team have given us a formidable platform to grow.  The debate and investment should not be limited to crop outputs and farming techniques alone. In fact, that approach to agricultural development is not part of the original Green Revolution mandate. Today's approach should be about broadening the definition of agricultural development and extending its impact to health, nutrition, economic growth and overall community development. I think this is really at the heart of  "Norm's" work, his legacy and all that he has taught us, and we shouldn't lose sight of it as we pave a path forward.