A Galvanizing Moment
Staying the course in the fight to end global hunger
This past September, I joined USAID to oversee the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security and to serve as the Deputy Global Coordinator for Development for Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative. Returning to the Agency, whose mission I am deeply passionate about, is a welcome moment for me. But it is also a somber one, as I return in the midst of an unprecedented food security crisis to serve as USAID’s first Global Food Crisis Coordinator.
This new role recognizes the very challenging times we are now confronting and will be for the foreseeable future.
COVID-19, global conflicts — including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and severe weather events exacerbated by climate change have caused millions of people to lose their incomes and ability to feed their families as well as lowered agricultural production in many fragile and famine prone regions of the world.
We are also seeing the reversal of decades of progress in the fight against hunger, with more than 200 million in need of life-saving food assistance and some 800 million who are chronically hungry — with women and children disproportionately affected.
And the most severe impacts of the crisis are playing out in the Horn of Africa, where an unprecedented five consecutive rainy seasons have failed and more than 20 million people are suffering from the region’s worst drought in at least seven decades.
Hunger cannot be fought with food alone.
While humanitarian aid is critical for saving lives, it does not generally leave countries, communities or farmers better able to recover from the next failed harvest or shock. That’s why our response to this crisis sits squarely with Feed the Future, an initiative itself borne out of a crisis more than a decade ago and designed to help vulnerable countries successfully respond and recover to shocks like these.
To meet the pivotal moment we now face, we must expedite development investments that will both mitigate the worst effects of the global crisis while building more sustainable and resilient systems for the longer term. Over the past few months, I joined Administrator Samantha Power at the UN General Assembly, World Food Prize and most recently, COP27, to share how USAID is acting with urgency and at scale to do this.
USAID has delivered more than $10 billion in life-saving development assistance and nearly doubled our development food security work to more than $2 billion, thanks to the bipartisan support and generosity of the U.S. Congress. With it, we are expanding our development assistance in key ways to forestall a more dire situation. This means mitigating the impacts of global fertilizer shortfalls; expanding and accelerating support to smallholder farmers so they have the inputs, financing, and other support they need to remain productive; and cushioning the worst effects of the crisis on the most vulnerable. And in support of these efforts, President Biden announced earlier this year the expansion of Feed the Future to eight additional countries — all of which are located in Africa — to bring the total number of target countries to 20.
Looking Ahead
While we face the specter of an increasingly hungry world, there is good reason for hope. At COP27, the need for sustainable food and water solutions in light of the climate crisis was high on the agenda. Many private sector companies joined the United States to commit to greater investments in climate adaptation, including through a Call to Action in support of the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE). And others joined USAID to invest in new research and innovations for climate smart food systems under the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM for Climate).
Building on this momentum, what should be next for the development community?
First, stay the course. We must collectively double down on getting game-changing research and technology into the hands of farmers to help them increase their productivity and incomes while adapting to climate change. Investments that improve fertilizer use efficiency and soil health, for instance, help farmers boost their yields today in the absence of widely available fertilizer while also creating conditions for long term, more sustainable food production. Our response to this crisis needs to intentionally find opportunities to speed up adoption of the improved technologies and techniques that we know can have a transformative impact.
Second, understand and address risk. It is critical to consider not just the risks we are facing today, but those that are looming on the horizon. Ensuring that farmers have access to high quality climate data to plan for these risks is essential. This translates into better data, but also better access to digital technologies and information systems. Farmers and communities also need more access to tools that address risk, such as innovative financing that links credit to crop insurance. In support of the PREPARE Action Plan, USAID is advancing new climate models and supporting disaster risk financing as part of our global crisis response.
Third, advance locally-driven solutions. Engaging indigenous and women leaders and youth elevates their voices, helps us understand their challenges, and guides us to more effective solutions. At last year’s COP26, USAID endorsed the Principles for Locally Led Adaptation and we shared our progress advancing our localization agenda at this year’s conference.
Supporting national governments seeking to adopt productive policies and programs to address the global hunger crisis is also a top priority. If donor nations do this collectively, we can more rapidly advance a shared agenda.
To that end, I am excited to join U.S. Government leaders next week to meet with African leaders and other stakeholders at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit.
There, we will discuss specific actions we can take together to help African countries meet their commitments to the African Union-led Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program and break the cycle of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.
Times like these challenge us in new ways, but they also offer us opportunities to work together to achieve truly transformative results. I look forward to continuing to build bridges across the private sector, government and civil society, and using USAID’s convening power and catalytic resources to create momentum for more sustainable and equitable solutions.
About the Author
Dina Esposito is the Feed the Future Deputy Coordinator for Development and USAID’s Global Food Crisis Coordinator.
