Today, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Jake Sullivan and USAID Administrator and Feed the Future Coordinator Samantha Power announced that the United States government, working with Congress, has committed more than $80 million of new Feed the Future funds and supplemental resources to rapidly respond to impacts of recent droughts and the lingering macroeconomic shocks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These funds through Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger initiative, will build on past successes, reduce hunger and chronic malnutrition, and accelerate future agriculture-led economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. These funds build on the more than $20 billion that the United States has committed in global emergency and development food security programming over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration.
The more than $80 million of new USAID funding supports the Feed the Future Accelerator, an effort to deepen the U.S. government’s food security partnership and focus resources on three countries in Southern and Eastern Africa – Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia. These food security “accelerator” countries demonstrate both high need and high agricultural potential. These funds complement a diverse Feed the Future portfolio of $577 million, including over $497 million of ongoing U.S. investments in these three countries, plus more than $150 million in private sector investments. Assistant to the Administrator Dina Esposito announced $25 million of supplemental resources at the Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) on September 3, 2024, which includes $5 million of supplemental resources announced by Deputy Administrator Isabel Coleman on June 27, 2024.
Under the Feed the Future Accelerator, U.S. investments will harness the region’s combination of fertile land, diverse farming systems, and reform-minded governments to support a regional breadbasket. This has the potential to stimulate inclusive, economic growth across borders while strengthening the resilience of producers and systems to endemic shocks and stresses. Recent research has demonstrated that increasing cereal yields by 25 percent in Eastern and Southern Africa could boost the value of agricultural production in the region by over $24 billion by 2030 and reduce hunger for 22 million people. In addition, investments in the Feed the Future Accelerator present an opportunity to leverage planned hard infrastructure developments in the Lobito Corridor to connect producers to new markets, increase regional food trade, and decrease travel time for agricultural products – reducing some of the $4 billion of food that is lost or wasted in Africa each year.
A series of recent, unprecedented global shocks to the food system, coupled with conflict, have underscored the urgency of Feed the Future’s core mandate to build a more resilient global food system by concentrating investments in areas of agricultural potential amidst the many hunger hotspots around the world. The Accelerator allows Feed the Future to meet key challenges of the moment while delivering on the objectives of the U.S. Global Food Security Strategy.
Malawi was identified as an “accelerator” country due to the potential for transformational impact through improved agricultural productivity in partnership with private sector companies to accelerate sustainable, resilient, and inclusive wealth generation. It will receive funding to help build agricultural resilience, improve watershed management and support farmers in their adoption of climate-smart practices. Thirty-eight percent of Malawians still live below the poverty line and recurring droughts continue to threaten the livelihoods of its smallholder farmers, who constitute 80 percent of the population. Thus continued investment in agriculture resilience remains paramount.
Over the past decade, Feed the Future through USAID Malawi’s Feed the Future Growth Poles Project, has increased smallholder farmers access to farm inputs, organized over 23,000 rural Malawians into village savings and loan groups, trained over 60,000 farmers in agricultural practices and technologies that increase productivity, and improved access to markets by linking smallholder farmers to off-take anchor firms for promoted value chains. These experiences provide a roadmap for scaling our approaches, increasing production of marketable commodities while helping many thousands of farm families escape poverty.
“At this critical moment when nearly 6 million Malawians are dealing with widespread El Niño induced climate impacts, including increased household food insecurity, we believe this support brings into focus a critical opportunity for Malawians. Together with farmers and the Government of Malawi, private sector, and others in the agri-food system, the U.S. government will help build resilience and support Malawians to achieve better household and community food security, as well as drive economic growth through partnerships,” USAID Mission Director Pamela Fessenden said.
Read about Feed the Future’s work in Malawi.