Assessing Feed the Future and U.S. Leadership on Food Security

A new report from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs applauds U.S. government agencies for food security leadership but calls on them to up the game in the face of rising global challenges and shrinking aid budgets. While it is a positive assessment, the report highlights some areas of concern that could affect U.S. leadership in future years.The report is timely for two reasons.  First, it is anticipated that food security will be a topic of discussion at the upcoming G-8 meeting at Camp David.  With budget austerity gripping the attention of most international donors, it will be interesting to see if commitments to food security will be maintained and whether outstanding pledges will be filled.Secondly, the administration’s Feed the Future initiative is now two years old.  This is old enough to be assessed from a policy coherence and implementation perspective; not sufficient time for impact evaluations relating to farm yield, availability of nutritional foods, access to credit, increases in income, among others, as the report duly notes.The report gives high marks to leadership from the State Department, USAID, and MCC, and good marks to Congress and USDA, but calls on all of them to up their game in the face of global challenges and funding issues at home.  A fair degree of the high grades are attributed to steady increases in funding for agriculture and food security, momentum that could come to a screeching halt if recommendations of the House Budget Committee are adopted.While it has been on the Rethink agenda to do a progress report on Feed the Future, I would offer the following thoughts, some raised in the Chicago Council report and others not.

• Feed the Future was the first explicit endorsement of a whole-of-government approach.  While it is helpful to assess the performance of each individual government agency, there is a clear gap in assessing whether the whole-of-government approach enhances performance overall or is more of a hindrance to getting the job done.  Coordination is never easy among bureaucracies, but I’m hearing there are still some inter-agency food fights and duplicative efforts both in DC and the field.
• Food security depends on more than just raising farm yield, and as the report rightly notes, the U.S. government has neglected to invest more in research, education, and extension.  Feed the Future has a research strategy, but building the educational capacity of universities in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia is not a very strong component.  I’m not talking about the feel good 3-week study trips bringing over African academics and government officials to tour US farms and universities.  I’m talking about building the institutional capacity of those universities to produce agronomists, biologists, veterinarians, agricultural economists, nutritionists, and the other academic specialties that are needed to generate their own solutions to local challenges.  It is well understood that the current state of universities in Africa are good at producing bureaucrats.  Scientists and extension agents?  Not so much.
• The administration may have missed the window to get legislation authorizing a food security program when it walked away from the Lugar-Casey Global Food Security Act of 2009. (Disclosure: I led the team that wrote the legislation so I am clearly biased.)  Even if this decision is reversed, legislation would not be possible until next year given the election calendar.  Even then, it would depend on the political dynamic coming out of the election results.  Legislation is important because it helps to solidify continuing congressional support across administrations.
• Without congressional buy-in, funding over the long-term is vulnerable.  Aid for agriculture, just one component of a food security strategy, has shown a high degree of volatility over several decades. Such inconsistency can undermine previous gains and in the end is an inefficient use of funds.
• Part of overcoming budget concerns is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of aid dollars.  A good start, highlighted in the Chicago Council report, is to reform food aid programs, such as eliminating monetization and expanding local and regional purchase.

Moving the nearly 925 million people who suffer from chronic malnourishment into the food secure category will take time and perseverance among countries working in partnerships.  It will also take the studied attention of organizations like the Chicago Council to keep asking the right questions.Here at CGD, my colleagues are doing the same. For more of our work on food security and assistance, see Vijaya Ramachandran’s working group on food security and the Rome-Based agencies and her work on hedging strategies, Kim Elliott’s working paper on innovative funding mechanisms for agriculture investment, or Amanda Glassman’s work on cash transfer programs and improved nutrition.