Devex Dish: Investment, prizes, and election anxiety at the Borlaug Dialogue

Greetings from sunny Des Moines, Iowa, where this Midwest gal — I grew up outside Chicago — has been very happy to meet so many Dish readers in person at the annual World Food Prize’s Borlaug Dialogue.

Over 1,400 crop scientists, farmers, government leaders, private-sector players, and food systems experts from around the world have gathered in the home state of Norman Borlaug, the famed agronomist and father of the Green Revolution.

This year’s event falls a week before a hugely consequential U.S. election. Whoever wins the presidency — and which party takes control of each house of Congress — could have major implications for the future of U.S. foreign aid programs. For a discussion of that, join our election debriefing event on Nov. 12.

As several Borlaug attendees told me, the election outcome could also mean whether domestic and foreign programs can even use terms like “climate change” and “sustainability.” Yikes.

We’re just a day in, but here’s what I’ve seen and heard so far:

• The conference kicked off Tuesday with a panel featuring World Bank President Ajay Banga and African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina on achieving a hunger-free world. They emphasized the importance of partnerships, connecting smallholder farmers to resources quickly, putting up climate finance, and investing in young people and particularly youth entrepreneurship. “I have never seen a young person who wants to fail. We are failing them by putting a lack of economic resources behind their ideas,” said Adesina, a 2017 World Food Prize laureate.

• The U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation and the government of Zambia celebrated a newly announced $491 million debt-free grant called the Zambia Farm-to-Market Compact. It aims to bring in policy reforms to attract private investment; improve 338 kilometers (210 miles) of road and transportation along Zambia’s agriculture corridors; and improve access to finance for small- and medium-sized farmers to help them adopt things such as irrigation, agro-processing, and storage facilities.

• The food here is top-notch — which is probably par for the course for a food conference. So far my personal winner for best snack goes to the spicy salsa with cowpeas, aka black-eyed peas, which was served at Gates Ag One’s side event on cowpeas’ potential as a powerhouse for food security. Gotta have more cowpeas!

• The World Food Prize is often called the Nobel Prize for food and agriculture. This year’s laureates are Cary Fowler and Geoffrey Hawtin, who each played a major role in creating the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — or “doomsday” vault — an arctic facility in Norway that safeguards the world’s seed varieties to protect genetic diversity and global food security. They’ll be honored at a ceremony Thursday at the gold-domed Iowa State Capitol building. It’s my first time attending the World Food Prize, but I’m told there will be trumpets.

Background reading: Scientists behind arctic ‘doomsday’ seed vault win World Food Prize

ICYMI: US Feed the Future ramps up investments in Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia

+ Are you at the Borlaug Dialogue and want to meet? Send me a note at tania.karas@devex.com or just say hi if you spot me!

Some personal food for thought

At these kinds of gatherings, it’s easy to get lost in the jargon of program rollouts, financing instruments, and shiny tech-fueled silver bullets for ending hunger. But how do these discussions help smallholder farmers? To echo some of Borlaug’s final words before he died in 2009: “Take it to the farmer.”

And so this week I’ve been thinking about my dad and uncle. They grew up in the 1960s in a poor family of nine children on a farm in western Greece. Their village, Apideonas, is named for the bitter pears that used to grow there. Poverty forced my dad and most of his siblings to migrate in their early teens to Athens and eventually the United States. Remittances kept the small farm going, and today my uncle works the land largely on his own. But climate change in Greece — namely drought and changing weather patterns — makes it extremely hard for him to eke out a living. Going forward, it’s unclear whether any of the cousins in my generation will want to take on the risk of keeping the farm going.

It’s a familiar story, one that plays out the world over, particularly in the global south. But as former Bread for the World President David Beckmann — himself a 2010 World Food Prize laureate — told me Tuesday: “The fact that progress against global hunger has stalled and in some ways is getting worse, it’s a big, big problem, but it is fixable.” Many of the answers can be found right here this week in Des Moines.

Meanwhile, in Washington

The Borlaug Dialogue comes on the heels of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund annual meetings in Washington, D.C. Last week, my colleague Ayenat Mersie and I were on the ground learning as much as we could about the bank’s investment plans for agribusiness, food security, and nutrition.

And quite a lot is happening! Last week, Banga announced that the bank will double its commitments to the agribusiness sector to $9 billion each year by 2030, Ayenat reports.
“The effort to transform agribusiness is not only about securing the food systems of tomorrow — it is fundamentally a jobs initiative,” Banga said, noting that some 1.2 billion young people in lower-income countries will enter the workforce over the next decade, but only 420 million jobs are expected to be available.

The bank is also the lead “knowledge partner” on the soon-to-be-launched Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty — a major initiative of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as his country presides over the Group of 20 largest economies this year.

As part of that partnership, Banga has said, the bank will make financing available from the International Development Association, its fund for the lowest-income countries, to help countries implement policies to reduce hunger and poverty. The bank seeks a record-breaking $100 billion from its donors for its latest IDA replenishment cycle. A pledging conference is set for Dec. 5 in Seoul, South Korea.

Read: World Bank doubles agribusiness investment to $9B in strategy shift

Related: The World Bank’s IDA replenishment — the money, the odds, the high stakes

Cough up the cash

If there’s one person who can get opposing political parties on board with funding development and humanitarian work abroad, it’s probably David Beasley.

The straight-talking former executive director of the World Food Programme raised a record-breaking $55 billion in his six years leading the agency. As a Republican and former governor of South Carolina, he also knows a thing or two about convincing political conservatives that foreign aid is in their own interest. Beasley spoke onstage at Devex’s flagship event, Devex World, last week.  

“If you’re not going to do it out of the goodness of your heart, of loving your neighbor, then you better do it out of your financial interest, in your national security interest,” he said of how he speaks to governments and decision-makers around the world.

“You talk about the IPC level 3, 4, 5, that’s just like — what are you talking about?” he said of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the global standard for measuring levels of hunger and famine.

“But you explain it in simple terms: People are starving, and here’s what’s happening. So a child along our border, a child shelter’s like $3,750 a week, $60 million a week [total]. We can have a resilience program back in Guatemala for [$1] to $2 a week.”

“‘So Mr. Anti-aid, do you want to spend $3,750 a week, or $1 to $2 a week?’ You’ve got to make it that practical.”

Read: David Beasley believes the US can once again lead on foreign aid (Pro)

Don’t miss our rare interview with Howard Buffett: From farms to war zones — the down-to-earth billionaire (Pro)

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Chew on this

Italy’s G7 plan for transforming food systems in Africa should deliver on addressing food security and climate change on the continent, ECDPM’s Cecilia D’Alessandro writes in an opinion piece. [Devex]

“Fuel to fork,” a new podcast series by IPES-Food, TABLE, and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food looks at the role that fossil fuels play in food production. [iPES FOOD]