Global Food for Thought

Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security: RESCHEDULED

The Chicago Council is pleased to announce a number of updates to its Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security.  This spring’s event, planned for April 22, has been rescheduled for Thursday, May 20, 2010, in Washington, D.C.  

Dan Glickman (former secretary, US Department of Agriculture) and Catherine Bertini (former executive director, World Food Program) will continue as event cochairs.  

Rajiv Shah, administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development, will deliver a keynote address.  A senior representative from the U.S. Department of the Treasury will also discuss the World Bank-hosted Multilateral Food Security Fund, also known as the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GASFP).

A symposium on May 20 will be well positioned to respond and engage with the ideas coming out of the World Bank/IMF spring meeting and will build on their momentum in the press, Congress, Administration, and international community.  It will also provide an opportunity to keep food security issues at the forefront of the national and international development agendas in the run-up to June’s meeting of the G-8.  

The Chicago Council will continue to partner with the following organizations for this event:

• Bread for the World
• Concern Worldwide
• Global Harvest Initiative
• InterAction
• International Center for Research on Women
• ONE Campaign
• Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa
• United States Institute of Peace
• World Food Prize Foundation

An updated event agenda and information on how to register for the event will be available shortly. Please contact Lindsay Iversen, or phone (312.821.7560) for further information.

We appreciate your patience as we endeavor to build the best possible event and thank you for your continued interest.

Tracking Developments at the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development

The Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD) continued for a third day Tuesday in Montpellier, France. 

About one thousand participants - a group consisting of scientists, policymakers, aid experts, businessmen, and advocacy groups - are meeting in an attempt to devise a way out of the hunger crisis by producing an action plan for G8 and G20 countries to boost agriculture and help ensure food security.

Released last week and presented at the conference, a new report, "Transforming Agricultural Research for Development," calls for a big push to develop agriculture in the poorest countries if the world hopes to feed itself in future decades. The report, the result of consultations with over 2,000 experts and national research organizations around the world, notes that with the world's population soaring to nine billion by mid-century, crop yields must rise - yet climate change threatens to slash them. 

"It's a huge problem," said Sir Gordon Conway from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, the conference's keynote speaker.

"We have more than a billion people hungry at the moment, then on top of that we're going to have to feed a growing human population - we're looking at having to double food production by 2050."

The Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development continues through March 31st.  

This Week's Edition of the Global Food for Thought News Brief

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Roger Thurow - Outrage & Inspire

ALL EFFORTS GREAT AND SMALL

After the passage of the health care bill, doing the big and historic is again possible in politics.

On the international front, the equivalent is President Obama’s Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, popularly known as Feeding the Future.  Ending hunger through agriculture development, particularly in Africa, would be both very big and supremely historic.

The challenge is enormous: one billion people in our world are chronically hungry.  That’s an historic high in absolute numbers.  And with the population growing and demand for food increasing, we’ll have to double food production by 2050 if we’re to make any permanent reduction in the ranks of the hungry.  The President is asking Congress for $3.5 billion over three years to fund the U.S. commitment to the food security initiative, which is part of a larger $22 billion three-year pledge from the world’s rich countries.  These sums sound big, but in present-day political spending terms, they’re veritable chicken feed.  Last summer, Congress came up with $3 billion and spent it in a couple of months on the Cash for Clunkers program.  Surely Congress can scratch up the same amount of money to make a big dent in the world hunger problem and stimulate the lives of the bottom billion as it did to get some wheezing gas-guzzling cars off the road and stimulate the auto industry.

Hunger: The Common Enemy of All Millennium Development Goals?

Nicola Winter, a contributor at MediaGlobal, wrote a thoughtful summary of a session at the World Affairs Council's WorldAffairs 2010 conference earlier this month in San Francisco. The session, titled "Responding to the World Food Crisis," focused on how hunger is an integral component to all aspects of development. 

In her piece, Winter notes that this point was underscored by Roger Thurow, senior fellow of global agriculture and food policy at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, who said, “[h]unger is the common enemy to all Millennium Development Goals,” and pointed out that unlike other epidemics like HIV or cancer, hunger is “one great world problem that we have the power and know how to solve.”

Indeed, Winter agrees that it "makes sense that the eradication of hunger and extreme poverty is the first MDG, as none of the other" goals can be accomplished without first reducing hunger. What is missing, Winter notes, is the right approach.

Additional Resources on the Millennium Development Goals:

• United Nations, "Keeping the promise: a forward-looking review to promote an agreed action agenda to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015," Report of the Secretary-General, March 2010. 
• United Nations Millennium Development Goals Gap Task Force, "MDG Gap Task Force Report 2009," 2009. 

This Week's Edition of the Global Food for Thought News Brief

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If you have not signed up to receive Global Food for Thought by email, please do so by clicking here.

Roger Thurow - Outrage & Inspire

IMPATIENCE

Bill Gates calls himself an “impatient optimist.”

Would that we all shared his optimism and, especially, his impatience.

Testifying last week before the Senate foreign relations committee, he injected a dose of urgency into the task of improving global health and agriculture development:

“I am optimistic because aid works.  I am also impatient.  We know how to save lives, we have low-cost tools, but children are still dying because we can’t reach them all with the interventions that we have.  Solutions won’t solve anything if they can’t be delivered.  Every human life is precious, and every death is tragic, and this gives me a sense of urgency to create and deliver what is needed.”

His testimony was welcomed by Sen. Dick Lugar, the committee’s ranking member and co-author, along with Sen. Robert Casey, of the Global Food Security Act.  That bill, which would provide the political support and financial backing for the Obama administration’s ambitious Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, was first introduced in 2008 and passed by the committee, but it has languished in the legislative land beyond, overshadowed by the domestic health care debate and an array of foreign policy “hot spots.”

Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security: RESCHEDULED

The Chicago Council is very pleased to announce that its Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security, originally planned for February 22, 2010, has been rescheduled for Thursday, April 22, 2010 in Washington, D.C. 

Dan Glickman (former secretary, US Department of Agriculture) and Catherine Bertini (former executive director, World Food Program) will continue as event cochairs.  

Rajiv Shah, administrator, US Agency for International Development, will deliver a keynote address. 

There will be a great deal happening on food security this spring that will make a mid-April symposium both timely and policy-relevant.   The event will occur right before the annual World Bank/IMF meeting, and the Senate is expected to consider the Lugar-Casey legislation after the spring recess.  Moreover, the policymaking and NGO community will have had time to consider newly-released details from the Administration’s Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative.  Invitations to the event will be re-issued shortly.  An updated agenda is forthcoming.   

The Chicago Council will continue to partner with the following organizations for this event:

• Bread for the World
• Concern Worldwide
• Global Harvest Initiative
• InterAction
• International Center for Research on Women
• ONE Campaign
• Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa
• United States Institute of Peace
• World Food Prize Foundation

To seek further information about the new symposium plans, please contact Lindsay Iversen, or phone (312.821.7560).

We appreciate your patience as we have endeavored to reschedule the event and thank you for your continued interest.

GAO Releases Assessment of U.S. Global Food Security Strategy

A new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), "Global Food Security: U.S. Agencies Progressing on Governmentwide Strategy, but Approach Faces Several Vulnerabilities," was released today. 

The report provides a comprehensive assessment of the types and funding levels of food security programs and activities of relevant U.S. government agencies, as well as of progress in developing an integrated U.S. governmentwide strategy to address global food insecurity, as well as potential vulnerabilities of that strategy. 

Twin Bills: Clinton, Gates Testify Before SFRC on Global Health; Lugar Highlights Importance of Food Security to Global Health

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and former U.S. president Bill Clinton, chairman of the Clinton Global Initiative, spoke in favor of legislation that would increase support for global health and proposed more cost-effective ways to tackle HIV/AIDS and poverty worldwide.