Lindsey Graham wants Elon Musk to bankroll a global food security fund

Elon Musk may not believe a $1 billion donation to the World Food Programme can solve global hunger. But what about a cash infusion for a new multilateral food security fund? South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said Wednesday that in the face of skyrocketing food insecurity, the U.S. government’s bilateral programs aren’t getting the job done. He wants to see a new public-private partnership modeled after The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria that would fund research and programs aimed at increasing food production in “unstable regions.” “I could tell Mr. Musk, ‘if you and some of your friends could come up with some cash and if we created a global food security fund it would make a lot of difference,’” Graham said, alluding to the billionaire’s attention-grabbing Twitter exchange in 2021 with former WFP head David Beasley — Musk did not end up donating to WFP. Graham, a Republican, floated the idea at a Senate hearing to review President Biden’s budget request for U.S. foreign assistance. He said the goal of such a fund would be to use U.S. government money to leverage contributions from other countries and the private sector in pursuit of measurable food security outcomes. Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the lone witness at the hearing, said she thought Graham’s idea was good “in principle,” but that it didn’t fully account for the difference between global health and global food security funding. Namely, the U.S. government has spent billions more on global health than it has on global food security. Creating a new fund, she warned, could risk carving an already small pie into even smaller slices. “If we would wish to increase our investments, I assure you even bilaterally we could bring about far more substantial results,” Power said. Few expect major increases to U.S. foreign assistance budgets this year. An estimated 345.2 million people will be food insecure this year — double the number from 2020, and roughly 10 million more than the total population of the United States. “No matter what happens in the next election and who’s in charge of this place, I want to get everybody on this committee working together, working with the Biden administration, and working with private sector organizations and academic institutions throughout the world to set the infrastructure this year or early next year for a global food security fund,” Graham said. “Because if we don’t do something the 345 million can double in the next four or five years,” he added. Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat and potential collaborator with Graham in the effort, said that what they are interested in exploring is “a fund that helps incentivize agricultural transformation of systems, comparable to what we have accomplished through PEPFAR,” the flagship global AIDS initiative that has saved 20 million lives in two decades. Coons, who chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign aid spending, added that he hopes for “an additional meeting, conversation, or even hearing” on the topic. “We’ll see,” he said.