The United States has updated its Global Food Security Strategy to “adapt to a rapidly changing global context” and support achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, according to the new five-year document released Thursday.
The strategy, the second of its kind, will guide the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future initiative from 2022 to 2026 with the goals of reducing poverty and stunting — or low height for age — by 20% in places where its programs operate.
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“Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, 97 million more people now live on less than $2 a day—the first global increase in extreme poverty in more than two decades. Sadly, this increase in poverty will not simply disappear when the pandemic ends, and if unchecked could persist well into the coming decades,” USAID Administrator Samantha Power said in the introduction to the new strategy. “We can seize the initiative to accelerate and protect progress in reducing global poverty despite the pandemic.”
Feed the Future, aimed at ending hunger and food insecurity worldwide, has operated in 21 countries since it began in 2010. There are ongoing programs in 12 nations in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. The first GFSS, released in 2016, was mandated by the Global Food Security Act and designed to improve the program’s operations.
At last month’s United Nations Food Systems Summit, Power said $5 billion — half of the $10 billion announced by President Joe Biden to “end hunger and invest in the food system” — would go toward “fighting global food insecurity” through Feed the Future, which intends to expand to additional countries.
The new GFSS has three objectives: “inclusive and sustainable agriculture-led economic growth”; “strengthened resilience among people and systems”; and a “well-nourished population, especially among women and children.” It details what it calls “intermediate results” and outlines plans for achieving them.
The strategy also identifies five “new or elevated priority areas” that it said must be the focus of U.S.-funded hunger reduction work as achieving this goal becomes more complex due to the pandemic and other factors.
These include “Proactively Countering the COVID-19 Pandemic’s Long-Term Effects” on food systems, economies, and therefore the ability of people to access food. The pandemic is “undermining” past Feed the Future gains, the document said, but the initiative will focus future efforts on restoring food production and market systems while making them “more resilient to shocks and stresses.”
“An Ambitious Approach to Climate Change” will also be required because of how shifts in climate patterns are disrupting agriculture worldwide. Farmers now regularly experience crop failures, more frequent and extreme weather events, water insecurity, and a depletion of natural resources. Feed the Future will prioritize “locally-led solutions” while recognizing that many of the places seeing land conversion and forest loss — which negatively impact ecosystems — are outside the initiative’s countries of operations.
The GFSS sees conflict as a large driver of hunger worldwide and focuses on “Integration of Conflict Mitigation, Peacebuilding, and Social Cohesion” with efforts to eliminate it. According to Feed the Future, much of its programming takes place “in areas characterized by tension among and within social and socioeconomic groups, social marginalization, and in some cases, outright violence.” Working with other development and humanitarian programs will be key to reducing hunger in such areas, the strategy said.
Reducing hunger will also require “Working Across the Food System” from production to consumption, the new strategy said, as well as an additional priority: “Equity and Inclusion” of marginalized groups such as women, LGBTQ people, youths, Indigenous people, and migrants.
According to Feed the Future, the initiative has helped lift 23.4 million people out of poverty and prevent 3.4 million children from being stunted and 5.2 million families from going hungry.
“We can seize the initiative to accelerate and protect progress in reducing global poverty despite the pandemic.”
— Samantha Power, administrator, USAIDBut in reality, such metrics may be difficult to quantify. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report released in August found that only three out of 40 Feed the Future performance indicators both had measurable targets and were “clearly linked” to the initiative’s overarching goals of reducing poverty and child stunting.
In the report, GAO made eight recommendations to improve how Feed the Future assesses and reports on the initiative's progress. These include “establishing performance goals, ensuring that performance indicators follow leading practices, improving the clarity of public progress reports, sharing annual graduation scorecards, and completing required reviews of the graduation assessment process.”
USAID did not respond to a request for comment about whether it took these recommendations into account when developing the updated GFSS.
About the author
Teresa Welshtmawelsh
Teresa Welsh is a Senior Reporter at Devex. She has reported from more than 10 countries and is currently based in Washington, D.C. Her coverage focuses on Latin America; U.S. foreign assistance policy; fragile states; food systems and nutrition; and refugees and migration. Prior to joining Devex, Teresa worked at McClatchy's Washington Bureau and covered foreign affairs for U.S. News and World Report. She was a reporter in Colombia, where she previously lived teaching English. Teresa earned bachelor of arts degrees in journalism and Latin American studies from the University of Wisconsin.
