Global Food Security Strategy

Description

The Global Food Security Strategy or Feed the Future (FTF), is an interagency effort that addresses the root causes of hunger and poverty in the developing world and improves global food security and nutrition. It supports country-driven approaches that help countries transform their agricultural sectors and address systems failures, while working closely with the private sector to foster economic growth and establish connected, well-functioning markets.

What Does This Buy?

Funds are provided to partners through grants, cooperative agreements, and other mechanisms to implement need-based programming to support agricultural, nutrition, and resilience programs, research, and technical assistance, including research and development at U.S. and international institutions of higher education.

Justification for the Request

• Strategic investments in food security, agricultural research and development, and nutrition are the most effective ways to build resilience, which reduces vulnerability to food shocks and stresses and addresses chronic poverty and hunger.
• Since starting in 2011, FTF has achieved a 23% drop in poverty and a 32% reduction of stunting in its target countries. Feed the Future farmers have achieved higher product yields and earned $10.5 billion in agricultural sales.
• Feed the Future has lifted a projected 23.4 million people above the poverty line, relieved over 5.2 million households of hunger, and freed 3.4 million children from stunting.
• In 2017, 821 million people or one-tenth of the global population were chronically undernourished, with many on the brink of starvation, an increase of 44 million above 2015.
• In 2017, food insecurity increased for the first time in a decade, largely due to conflict in fragile countries that are home to most of the world’s poor.

U.S. Interest

• Programs support both large and small U.S. businesses. From U.S. farmers to cooperatives, agribusinesses, banks, and entrepreneurs, FTF partners with more than 60 U.S. companies, 10 of which are in the Fortune 500.
• Funds support research at U.S. universities and research institutions, drawing on American innovation and expertise in agriculture and protecting agricultural commodities from global threats such as pests, disease, and drought. More than 70 U.S. universities and colleges are involved in research at 24 FTF Innovation Labs.

Bold Vision

• Additional investments could protect and accelerate progress toward sustainably reducing global hunger, malnutrition, and poverty.
• Additional investments could renew efforts toward target countries that were recently dropped from FTF. Initially, the program was deployed in 19 focus countries, but in 2017 that number was reduced to 12, partially due to budget uncertainty.
• Additional investments could expand programs that mobilize domestic resource investments in agriculture and nutrition. In Africa, FTF partner governments outpaced their neighbors’ domestic investments in agriculture and increased their investments by an average of 25%, a rate four times that of other African countries and representing an additional $719 million per year. Small-holder and rural farmers in FTF countries are more likely to own their own land, shops, and technologies than their counterparts.

Impact of Cuts

• Cuts could undermine progress and effectiveness toward ending hunger. Evidence shows that where there is food insecurity, instability and conflict follow.
• The consequences of malnutrition are enduring and costly; cuts would cause setbacks that would reverberate for generations, prolonging the dependence on foreign assistance.