The Foreign Service Journal, March 2012

18 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 2 effects of the resulting famine have been devastating, forc- ing thousands of families to flee their homes and their countries in search of food. Some mothers have been un- able to carry all of their children on the long and arduous trek, while many who do complete the difficult journey are so weak and undernourished that they are unlikely to sur- vive. Such tragedies constantly remindme how difficult it can be to explain to my own young daughter what I do as head of USAID’s Bureau for Food Security. So I’ve started to tell her that in development, we’re really in the business of selling optimism. We have to believe deep down that pos- itive change is possible, even in the face of seemingly in- surmountable obstacles. And sometimes we have to change the way we work across the “relief to development” continuum to make a lasting dif- ference in people’s lives. With this insight in mind, President Barack Obama an- nounced a newmodus operandi for combating global hunger during the 2009 Group of Eight summit in L’Aquila, Italy. There he and fellow leaders of the world’s leading economies com- mitted to “act with the scale and urgency needed to achieve sus- tainable global food security.” This new initiative, which came to be called Feed the Fu- ture, is a multiagency effort to address the root causes of poverty and hunger that limit the potential of hundreds of millions of people around the world. The U.S. Agency for In- ternational Development plays a lead role in implementing the program, in concert with our partners at the State Depart- ment, Department of Agriculture, Peace Corps, Millen- niumChallenge Corporation, Treasury Department, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Overseas Private Invest- ment Corporation and U.S. African Development Foun- dation. While some cases of food insecurity may be sporadic or temporary, as many as 925 million people — nearly one- seventh of the world’s population — experience chronic hunger day after day, all year long. To help ease this suf- fering, Feed the Future has set an ambitious goal. By lever- aging more than $70 million in private investment for agriculture and spurring $2.8 billion in increased agricul- tural sector growth, we plan to help an estimated 18 million vulnerable women, children and family members—mostly smallholder farmers — escape poverty and hunger. Why the focus on agriculture to drive economic growth? Because an estimated three-quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas, where farming can be a key economic driver. Recent studies also establish that growth in agri- culture is, on average, at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as growth in other sectors. Over the coming years, we believe investments in agri- culture will be one of the fundamental forces transforming F OCUS John Atis, regional director for a USAID-supported program, at the Wynne Farm, a mountaintop training facility for farmers in Kenscoff, Haiti. KENDRA HELMER Paul Weisenfeld currently heads the U.S. Agency for In- ternational Development’s Bureau for Food Security. A minister counselor in the Senior Foreign Service, he pre- viously served as senior deputy assistant administrator of the Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, coordi- nator of the USAID Haiti Task Team following the Janu- ary 2010 earthquake in that country, and mission director in Peru and Zimbabwe, among other assignments.