WASHINGTON: 795 million people around the world do not have access to a sufficient supply of safe and nutritious food. The United Nations (UN) estimates that worldwide demand for food will increase 70 percent by 2050. To meet this need, production in developing countries will need to almost double.
Establishing global food security is important not only to hundreds of millions of hungry people, but also to the sustainable economic growth of developing nations and the long-term economic prosperity of the U.S.
As USDA helps countries become more food secure and raise incomes, they also expand markets for American producers. For example, between fiscal years 2010 and 2014, U.S. agricultural exports to developing countries grew 44.3 percent for developing countries, significantly outpacing the 33.4 percent for developed countries. Exports to Southeast Asia grew 56.5 percent.
In 2009, G8 nations committed to act with the scale and urgency needed to achieve sustainable global food security and to be accountable and coordinate with country development plans.
In the subsequent years, the U.S. has invested over $3.75 billion to address global food security, exceeding the president’s commitment and launched his Feed the Future Initiative.
USDA is a key member of the whole of government effort on Feed the Future and supports global food security through in-country capacity building, basic and applied research, and support for improved market information, statistics and analysis.
Around the world, USDA has helped to train small farmers and foreign officials on plant and animal health systems, risk analysis and avoiding post-harvest loss; completed assessments on climate change; and helped to increase agricultural productivity.
USDA staff members are strategically placed to monitor agricultural matters globally in more than 160 countries and assist in USDAs efforts to build local capacity. Since 2010, USDA has aligned its program with the Feed the Future Initiative to support agriculture development in select focus countries and regions; Ghana, Kenya, East Africa, Bangladesh, Haiti, Guatemala and Central America and worked in all 19 of the Initiative’s priority countries.
Over the past six years, USDAs international food aid programs benefited approximately 48.3 million individuals globally, with assistance valued at nearly $2.2 billion.
Over the past six years, USDA’s McGovern- Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program supported the education, child development and food security of some 26 million of the world’s poorest children in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
With the support of the McGovern Dole program, the UNs World Food Program provides a daily breakfast of rice, canned fish, vitamin A-fortified vegetable oil and yellow split peas to feed pre- and primary school students in Siem Reap and two other provinces in Cambodia.
The project also provides food scholarships, in the form of take home rations, to poor students as an income-based incentive to encourage poor food-insecure households to send their children to school regularly to increase student attendance and retention rates.
McGovern Dole Food for Education program provided training to over 132,000 people on child health and nutrition. Projects have trained health professionals, primary health care workers, community health workers, volunteers, and non-health personnel such as teachers, school administrators and parents.
In Mali, for example, as part of USDAs partnership with Catholic Relief Services over 2,000 people have been trained in basic health and nutrition practices such as child growth and development, malnutrition and how to prepare nutritious foods using locally available foods such as millet, peanuts and beans.
In order support the sustainability of McGovern Dole efforts, projects aim to create long-lasting public-private partnerships with businesses and producers. While USDA has just started to track these efforts, in the past year, 258 public-private partnerships have been formed.
Many of the public-private partnerships formed under the McGovern Dole program are partnerships between producer groups who commit to providing food to local schools, supplementing food provided by USDA.
As a result of USDA training in improved techniques and technologies, over 80,000 producers in fiscal year 2014 have adopted one or more improved techniques or management practices.
USDA programs often support increased access to and utilization of financial services in order to expand agricultural productivity and markets and trade. Making more financial loans shows that there is improved access to business development for producers, cooperatives, MSMEs and business enterprises including producers, service providers and manufacturers.
Important research on solving food production issues continues: USDA researchers sequenced the genome of wheat and the wheat stem rust pathogen, which threatens to destroy wheat crops worldwide, and distributed new wheat germplasm globally to reduce the risk of unproductive harvests.
USDA continues research to combat aflatoxin (mycotoxins can be lethally toxic in high dosages or cause dilatory health effects over the long-term in smaller dosages) through genetic resistance in maize and using RNAi approaches in peanut.
USDA is cooperating with over a dozen institutions in the U.S. and developing countries to provide resource poor farmers with dry bean cultivars with improved productivity and quality.
In 2013, the U.S., along with the United Kingdom, launched the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition initiative, which seeks to support global efforts to make agricultural and nutritionally relevant data available, accessible, and usable for unrestricted use worldwide.
The initiative encourages collaboration and cooperation among existing agriculture and open data activities. Open access to research, and open publication of data, are vital resources for food security and nutrition, driven by farmers, farmer organizations, researchers, extension experts, policy makers, governments, and other private sector and civil society stakeholders participating in “innovation systems” and along value chains.
