Emily guides ONE’s agricultural policy strategy and blogs on agricultural development, trade and food security. Before joining the team, Emily was a senior policy adviser at Oxfam America, where she advised on policy and advocacy strategy development on international trade negotiations, the Farm Bill, agricultural development, food security and biofuels. She has also authored numerous briefing papers and articles on trade, agriculture and development.
As you know, the G8 Summit is just a few days away. ONE has been working over the past few weeks to rally our ONE members to sign our petition to world leaders, asking them to prioritize global hunger and malnutrition at the Summit. To help put our petition into context, we interviewed with our friend Ambassador Don Steinberg, current Deputy Administrator at USAID with three decades of US diplomatic service. The questions we outlined below answer some of the most important points that our ONE members should look out for during and after the Summit.
Don Steinberg. Photo credit: El Tiempo
ONE: Hunger is a global issue — how is a focus on growth in the agricultural sector so central to poverty reduction, and why is an emphasis on Africa particularly important?
Ambassador Steinberg: Food security is vital to human security. On a national level, countries marked by hunger, volatile food prices, and poverty stemming from a lack of agricultural productivity face constant political and security crises that undercut stability and economic development.
This blog post was originally published on Business Fights Poverty, an online community for business and development.
The Camp David G8 Summit is fast approaching. Organizations like ONE have been working tirelessly to influence the G8’s thinking on food and nutrition security. We’ve asked the G8 to not only deliver on their past commitments, but more importantly, agree to do more.
OK, so it’s been about two weeks now since we launched Thrive, our campaign for global food security, which means you’ve had more than enough time to read the Thrive report and know it inside and out. Now’s the time to test your knowledge of global hunger and nutrition. Take this short quiz to find out:
If you haven’t heard, there is another food crisis brewing in West Africa. Niger and Chad are most affected, but Burkina Faso and Mali are also hard hit. The UN estimates that 16 million people across the Sahel region could be affected by a dangerous combination of drought, high food prices and limited coping strategies for those whose seasonal labor is restricted by political unrest in neighboring Libya and Côte d’Ivoire.
Photo courtesy of Irina Fuhrmann/Oxfam.
This includes approximately 5.4 million people in Niger (35 percent of the population), 3 million in Mali (20 percent), 1.7 million in Burkina Faso (10 percent), 3.6 million in Chad (28 percent), 850,000 in Senegal (6 percent), 713,500 in the Gambia (37 percent) and 700,000 in Mauritania (22 percent). That’s a lot of people.
The impacts are shocking. In addition to the millions in need of emergency food aid, in Niger, thousands of children are being pulled out of school — and the numbers are only set to rise. As more and more families migrate in search of better economic opportunities, an estimated half million young students are at risk of dropping out.
Sadly, Niger is no stranger to food crises. This crisis is the third in less than a decade. In 2005, 3.5 million people were plagued by drought. Only five years later, in 2010, Niger experienced another severe food crisis that affected nearly 8 million people. The country has yet to fully recover from that catastrophe, making this year’s drought and food shortages even harder to bear.
But herein lies the problem. This doesn’t need to happen. Drought may be an act of nature, but famine is manmade. It’s no secret that preventing food crises takes investment in early warning systems, food reserves, better seeds and irrigation, and more peace and security. Even though we know it’s so critical to make these smart investments, not enough has been done — and that’s not ok.
In accordance with the Rome Principles of Aid Effectiveness, world leaders pledged to $22 billion over three years to reverse the decline in spending on agricultural development and food security. Although some progress has been made towards these goals, most donors are likely to come up short. With the financial pledges of the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative set to expire this year, the upcoming G8 summit at Camp David presents an opportunity for world leaders, governments and the private sector to break the cycle of hunger, poverty and malnutrition.
When the time comes, ONE hopes you will add your voice to the fight.
On February 3rd, the famine in Somalia was declared over — but as my colleague Adrian Lovett wrote in a blog post last week, this is hardly a cause for celebration.
So people can still be dying or families can still be experiencing extreme hardship — just fewer of them. Even if there isn’t a famine, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a food crisis. We are clearly not “in the clear.”
Many thanks to ONE’s members, our collective voice has helped raise UN Appeal funding for the Horn of Africa by $1 billion and elicit another $700 million-plus in pledges. If combined and fulfilled, these pledges would more than fill the $530 million funding gap.
Business and food go hand in hand. Researching and developing new technologies that improve the quality of a seed or reduce the amount of time a farmer spends harvesting crops is largely done by the private sector. Private companies process, package, transport and market foods to all of us every day. So, there’s no question that private companies play a huge role in, if not dominate, our food supply.
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