5 Lessons Learned While Leading Food for Peace
Dina Esposito reflects on her six years serving as the program’s director
These lessons were drawn from a keynote speech delivered at the USAID and USDA 2016 International Food Assistance and Food Security Conference in October in Des Moines, Iowa.
Since its establishment in 1954, Food for Peace has helped provide U.S. food aid to 4 billion people in more than 150 countries. Today, it is the largest provider of both in-kind and cash-based food assistance in the world.
In the six years that I have served as Food for Peace director, the United States affirmed its commitment to dramatically advancing agricultural development, as well as global food and nutrition security. The landscape of hunger has changed with new conflicts and record levels of people displaced, but last year, the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals were launched, expressing a global commitment to ending hunger by 2030. As my time with Food for Peace comes to a close, I wanted to share five lessons I have learned:
One decade ago, 80 percent of the world’s humanitarian funding addressed natural disasters, while just 20 percent addressed conflicts. Today, those figures have reversed. As a result, the number of people displaced by violence has reached 65 million — a record high that is double what it was 10 years ago. On average, people remain displaced for 26 years. This is a very different scenario than natural disasters, where we can hope for recovery in a few years’ time.
This new reality has huge implications for everyone providing humanitarian assistance. The first World Humanitarian Summit took place in 2016 to acknowledge this unprecedented situation. Food for Peace and others reaffirmed a commitment to humanitarian action, advancing efforts to make food assistance more efficient, so that we can reach more people at current funding levels, and think creatively about new approaches to humanitarian assistance, even as we seek more durable solutions.
Food assistance should not just provide people with the calories they need; it should also address malnutrition, which causes stunting in children and has lasting effects on their development. Over the last five years, Food for Peace updated 21 of its available in-kind food items, reformulating food products with improved micro-nutrients and adding new items, including ready-to-use therapeutic feeding products and fortified rice.
We continue to improve this food basket and promote behaviors that improve nutrition like breastfeeding, but there are still pieces of the nutrition puzzle missing. We need to 1) Take a “life cycle” approach to nutrition by helping women throughout their lives, not just at pregnancy, to significantly improve stunting. 2) Close the gap between different approaches to acute and chronic malnutrition, because they exist in the same communities and are addressed by the same local health services. 3) Address environmental hygiene and food safety to tackle stunting by pairing food transfers with complementary health, water and sanitation activities.
In 2009, Food for Peace commissioned a five-year study on what factors result in food security gains that continue long after our development programs end. We learned that big results during the life of the project may actually undermine sustainability in the long run.
Applicants for our development funding now include sustainability strategies in their project designs, and we’re working with partners to better measure progress toward sustainability during the life of the program. We are also piloting a “refine and implement” approach, asking partners to spend more time listening and learning from communities rather than hitting the ground running. By getting smarter about the local context and underlying factors that could impinge on success, we can achieve both bigger and more sustainable results.
When President Obama’s global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future, began in 2009, it was unclear where Food for Peace fit into an effort focused on agricultural systems, markets and producers, rather than the most vulnerable community members. The answer emerged after severe droughts in the Horn of Africa in 2011 and West Africa in 2012. They not only caused severe food crises by devastating crop harvests — threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions — but also generated huge economic losses for the countries affected. Afterward, the international community converged around the idea of resilience as a concept to address the underlying causes of what made people vulnerable to recurrent natural disasters and other crises.
Since then, Feed the Future has expanded the geographic areas of its work to include those where Food for Peace has worked for years — drawing lessons from and building upon Food for Peace’s community-based development work. Feed the Future now co-designs and co-invests with Food for Peace in areas facing chronic poverty and recurrent crisis in order to build resilience and reduce the need for humanitarian assistance when shocks occur, such as a drought. Today, Food for Peace development programs are an important piece of the Feed the Future portfolio, and our achievements are reported in the Feed the Future progress reports. The new U.S. Global Food Security Strategy reflects the increasing importance of this agenda — elevating resilience-building as a new strategic objective.
Achieving zero hunger by 2030 is an ambitious goal, but one Food for Peace can help to reach. We have improved flexibility by tailoring programs to the local context, increased our ability to gather evidence-based results and adjust program designs, and developed new food products to better prevent and treat malnutrition.
We don’t do this work alone. We collaborate when we can with host governments and work with NGOs, United Nations agencies and the private sector. Together, we bring help and hope to the most food-insecure places in the world. Ending hunger requires collective action by public and private organizations, as well as individuals. As challenging as these times are, we are better placed than ever to make a difference.
About the Author
Dina Esposito is the Director of USAID’s Office of Food for Peace. Follow her @DEsposito_FFP.
