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The Feed the Future Initiative: Responding to Global Needs

Molly Jahn

Real food security—availability, access, utilization and stability—and the related goal of nutritional security is fundamental to the lives and livelihoods of all people yet is lacking for billions of people across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Recent food price spikes underscore the fragility of global food security, with current estimates that nearly a billion people are food insecure, affecting families in the United States and around the world, and billions more suffer from diet-related health issues including micronutrient and vitamin deficiencies, still widespread especially in the developing world. While the causes are many, the underlying challenges are clear: the world cannot achieve the Millennium Development Goals relating to hunger, poverty, health, gender equity and the environment without continued gains in agricultural productivity, resource efficiencies, strategies to reverse degradation of agricultural ecosystems and growth of agricultural incomes.

The goal of global food security will likely only become more difficult in light of estimates that agricultural productivity must increase by 70 percent or more by 2050 to provide sufficient food for an increasing population allowing for current projections regarding increased per capita intakes. Further, growth in agricultural productivity faces increasing challenges from land degradation, climate change, scarce water supplies, and competition for energy resources from industry and urbanization. The solution lies in part with increased investments in research toward enhanced and stabilized agricultural productivity with an emphasis on improving the nutritional quality of the diet, diversification and intensification of agricultural systems while reducing agriculture’s impact on natural resources and ecosystem services. Within the Feed the Future initiative, gains in productivity will be generated from a range of innovations, including crop and livestock resource use efficiency, genetic improvement of yield potential and nutritional/quality of agricultural products, integrated pest management, strategies that reduce and reverse degradation of agricultural ecosystems, reduced post-harvest losses and improved access to markets. The United States is especially well-positioned to provide leadership in harnessing rapid advances in science and technology to meeting the food security challenge.

The global research strategy under the US government’s Feed the Future Initiative is one part of the larger Feed the Future strategy and will be implemented in close coordination with other programs in the Initiative.