Rome, Italy
[Remarks as Prepared]
DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR ISOBEL COLEMAN: I too will add my thanks to Italy for their G7 leadership and dedicated focus on food security – one of the most pressing issues of our time.
Over the course of this year, we’ve grappled with this issue, sought solutions together, and emerged with promising plans of action, including the Apulia Food Systems Initiative. The Initiative’s focus on the three priority areas of climate, financing, and child nutrition offers a roadmap for significant progress.
The United States has been working to advance our approaches and accelerate our momentum toward increasing food security, particularly through the United States’ flagship global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future. For example, in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania, the prevalence of poverty in Feed the Future programming areas declined by an average of 25 percent between 2010 and 2019, compared to a three percent average decline in these country’s national poverty rates during this same period.
We welcome Italy’s decision to focus the G7’s food security efforts on Africa, a region that holds both the world’s highest rates of food insecurity and incredible potential for economic growth. USAID recently launched the Feed the Future Accelerator, an $80 million dollar endeavor with Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia to harness their potential to be not only regional breadbaskets but also global breadbaskets. We will do this by investing in resources that will help increase the productivity of its smallholder farmers, strengthen the development of agricultural small-and-medium enterprises, boost incomes, improve nutrition, and weather future shocks.
The Accelerator initiative will mobilize private sector investment and showcase the unique business opportunities in Africa. With their committed governments, dynamic private sectors, and high potential for agriculture-led growth, Zambia, Tanzania, and Malawi will be at the forefront of this effort.
The World Bank calculates that $38.7 billion is needed to fully finance treatment for severe acute malnutrition globally up to 2034.
The reality is we do not have the resources to finance this humanitarian need. So, we must not only use our financial resources more strategically, but we need to deliver more impact per dollar, by developing new, innovative approaches to financing food security initiatives.
USAID recently partnered with investment firms and our counterparts at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation to do just that, launching the Nutritious Foods Financing Facility. This financial model is designed to combine public and private funds and attract private capital for nutrition-focused initiatives, enabling small- and medium-sized enterprises to get access to the capital they need to grow and distribute nutritious foods in their local communities around the world.
We will also focus on infusing rigorous evidence more broadly and deeply across all our programming to maximize our impact per dollar because we have learned – from the global body of impact evaluation evidence – that there are some programs that deliver extraordinary returns. This kind of evidence-driven collaboration is an important step toward determining and implementing the most cost effective malnutrition programming – which we at USAID view as a paramount priority and a moral obligation as we seek to create the greatest impact possible with each dollar we spend.
While the U.S. is encouraged by the progress we are seeing, we know that we need the collaboration, commitment, ingenuity, and leadership of each of our G7 partners to meet this moment of global need.
The G7’s leadership in responding to the world’s food security challenges has been instrumental in driving very necessary change in the world, and I would urge all of us to consider how we can make our partnerships even more fruitful. Thank you.