“In the Horn of Africa, even in the midst of tragedy, there is a common humanity that unites us all.” -Rajiv Shah, Administrator, USAID

Along with the tragic photos and stories, Shah presented a bleak picture of the future. “More than 30,000 children have already died,” he said. “And the UN estimates that 750,000 more will die from this crisis, not just from lack of food but from disease.” And yet, this is a picture, Shah insisted, that should make the U.S. people proud. As a country and an administration, we’ve deeply invested in this crisis. Along with the help of the World Bank, and most importantly, the governments of Kenya and Somalia, more than eight million people who would’ve been highly vulnerable due to the famine are not, said Shah. A significant portion of our investment has been in vaccinations, both for children and animals, in order to prevent disease. Shah showed the audience a slide of Second Lady Jill Biden visiting a greenhouse outside of Nairobi, where they are growing a more nutritious orange-fleshed sweet potato that will give children more vitamin A to better stave off malnutrition and disease. We also understand the cultural aspect of dealing with this crisis, he said. “We know that women are the key to feeding the children. We know that when more income goes to women, they will use it for the family, contributing it to the education and nutrition of the children, and helping the community move out of poverty.”

Dr. Rajiv Shah at the Nov. 17th talk in Chicago.

Shah went on to discuss more than just the Horn of Africa crisis. He also reminded the audience of the continued need in Haiti. (“Though U.S. people have given overwhelmingly to Haiti, most don’t know the scale of what is still going on.”) He called attention to Feed the Future, the pledge made by President Obama at the 2009 G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, in light of the 2007-2008 food price spikes and the burgeoning global financial crisis at the time. Feed the Future was a response to the G8 leaders’ acknowledgement that these crises would have the greatest effect on more than three billion of the most vulnerable and impoverished people worldwide. He emphasized the need to represent all findings connected to Feed the Future in a transparent way so that the government will continue to support it going forward.

He also talked about the long-term economic and cultural implications of raising children under chronic malnutrition. He said that a crisis of this magnitude could actually affect children’s ability to one day contribute to the economy, stunting their long-term mental and physical development. He cited studies in which MRIs actually show long-term deterioration of brain matter, and other neurological damage, due to undernutrition and malnutrition in early development.

Visualizing Facebook friendships (by Paul Butler)

Finally, he emphasized the role that technology has played and will continue to play in empowering hungry people. He showed a slide of the world map ”according to Facebook.” The areas showing the most light were areas of high Facebook use and the places with the least light were no surprise: mostly, they were China, Russia, the Amazon, half of the Middle East and most of Africa. (See image at right.) Shah said that with the explosive growth of cell phones and the projected growth of Internet access throughout the developing world in the future, he expects that in 10-15 years on a map like this, “the whole world will be lit up.” The technological tools that NGOs and governments employ now to communicate with people in need, to ascertain where and who needs the most immediate help, and even to transfer money and goods, will only become more useful with greater technological infrastructure in place. He also called attention to Feed the Future’s new online campaign called FWD (Famine. War. Drought. Relief), a social media- and cell phone-based awareness campaign for the Horn of Africa crisis at usaid.gov/fwd.

This hour-long lunchtime talk with Administrator Shah was a provocative and, ultimately, relatively hopeful depiction of the current and future state of hungry people in the Horn of Africa, and the solution, according to Shah, is innovation. After all, he predicted, “The most entrepreneurial humanitarian organizations will continue to strive to think creatively and innovate to solve the world’s problems because they’re packed with people who care.”

Today, October 17, is the United Nations International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (IDEP) and this year’s theme is “From Poverty to Sustainability: People at the Centre of Inclusive Development.” First commemorated in 1987, the IDEP is “an annual opportunity to acknowledge the efforts of people living in poverty and to have their voices heard, recognizing that poor people are at the forefront of the fight against poverty and are critical partners for achieving sustainable development.” Opportunity International is in complete alignment with the objective of the IDEP–our core belief is that small-scale entrepreneurs can be big change agents in breaking the cycle of global poverty.

Opportunity staff and supporters just returned from our annual conference where we heard from poverty eradication experts and thought leaders in fields related to food security, global hunger and environmental sustainability. Among them were Dr. Julie Howard of USAID’s Feed the Future initiative; Ambassador Tony Hall of the Alliance to End Hunger; John Magnay, Opportunity’s agricultural advisor in Africa; and Richard Leftley, CEO of MicroEnsure, a purveyor of weather index crop insurance.

The experts shared that the most vulnerable people on the planet need not only short-term strategies to combat crop shortages, unpredictable weather and natural disaster, but they need long-term, sustainable solutions that they can implement for themselves to battle the effects of uncertain futures due to climate change and rising food prices. Agricultural finance products like market linkages and microloans, as well as weather index crop insurance, are sustainable, long-term solutions to these issues.

At Feed the Future, we’re working on long-term research to combat climate change and drought, as well as increase productivity of essential cereal crops and legumes.
-Dr. Julie Howard

World leaders have said to me, ‘Your aid is helpful, but when are you going to help our people get back on their feet?’ And they’re right. That’s what microfinance can do.
-Ambassador Tony Hall

There are one billion people in Africa, 75% of whom are involved in agriculture, yet the continent is not capable of feeding 100% of the people. [...] It’s most important that we finance agricultural production because that’s where we can most impact hunger in Africa. -John Magnay

MicroEnsure’s simple product and process design for microinsurance services, including weather index crop insurance, has created cost-effective access to risk protection for communities living in poverty. -Richard Leftley

Rosalinda Omega

Rosalinda Omega and her husband Topper sell flowers and garden plants in the market of Silangan, in Cebu City, the Philippines. Blessed with three kids, she and her husband work tirelessly but fear that they will not be able to save enough money to send her children to college. The couple rely mostly on the volume of harvested plants that are delivered to them by their supplier.

They know that environmental factors, seasonal celebrations, and the dwindling economy in this type of industry are just a few of the factors that could affect their income. Some days, the couple goes home with barely enough money to purchase even meager portions of food for their family.

Support Rosalinda and her family by contributing to her loan at opportunity.org/fundaloan »

For more on the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, click here.

Facilitator: Dennis Ripley, senior VP, international business development

Panelists:

Ambassador Tony Hall, Director, Alliance to End Hunger

Dr. Julie Howard, U.S. Government Deputy Coordinator for Development, Feed the Future

John Magnay, Senior agricultural advisor, Opportunity International

Q & A with the Panelists

Ripley: My opening question is for John. What are you doing to help global food security?

Panel (from left): Dennis Ripley, Dr. Julie Howard, John Magnay and Ambassador Tony Hall.

Magnay: We are offering not only financial services but market inputs and agricultural services. To give you an idea, I believe that smallholder farmers in Africa are producing about 40% of their potential, in part because harvests sit in-store and either get damaged by insects or spoil. Part of the solution is also that we lend in Trust Groups, the traditional microfinance model, which does not require collateral, to better access more impoverished farmers with these services.

Hall: The Alliance to End Hunger was founded on the understanding that everyone needs to be in the room, not just NGOs or faith-based groups or government entities or corporations. We’ve got to come together to solve the problem, and build political will. Secondly, we’ve been asked to build national alliances in-country. One of the problems we see in developing nations is that so many of the people need to rely on their governments. And we also want to build domestic solutions to hunger. Today, almost 50 million people in the U.S. are going to bed hungry. We believe no one in the U.S. should go to bed hungry either. We’re working with members of Congress and other leaders to find solutions to domestic hunger.

Howard: I work on USAID’s Feed the Future initiative with administrator Rajiv Shah. With this initiative, we’re trying to model a different kind of solution to hunger and food security issues. We had gotten into a pattern of putting band-aids on this problem. We work in 19 countries, and USAID takes ownership of this but works with local and federal government and we create a platform for all donors in private sector to come together to solve these problems.

Ripley: John, if you could be czar of food security, what would you do?

Magnay: Well, in Africa, you have to do it on a regional basis, not a country-to-country basis. But, for instance, though the Horn of Africa is experiencing a drought right now, a few years ago they experienced great rainfalls and great harvests but had no markets in which to sell their products. So we need to create conditions that can handle both the times of feast and the times of famine. Regions of Africa need to sit down and work out what their regional food security needs are, and then account for that with varieties of seed, fertilizer and irrigation. It’s a complex question but we have to do something.

Ripley: Does what John said overlap with what USAID is trying to do in Africa?

Howard: The difficulty is when regions don’t work together, and small economies strive to be self-sufficient. That’s our problem. But again it isn’t our problem, we can and should facilitate it, but it needs to be something that governments and entities do for themselves to accommodate the feast and the famine months. Also, it’s important that we engage women and youth in this work. Women play a very important role in agricultural, and in ensuring that children and families are fed. So they need to be an integral part of that process.

Hall: Women are key to this process. If we access the women, the children will get fed. Also, I think that Feed the Future is one of the best government programs we’ve had for food security because it focuses on agriculture. It has the potential to turn everything around. Whatever we do, we’ve got to do it together–to bring in NGOs and faith-based groups and governments and more.

Audience question: How does climate change affect global food security?

Magnay: Today in Uganda, for instance, I see the pressure of urbanization, the impact of deforestation, the melting of East African ice caps, and the drying up of the Mara River in Kenya. I had not seen these issues 30 years ago, and they create complexity and new issues. We need to gather more data about it and monitor the situation, but we can adapt to these new changes and will find solutions to ensure food security.

Howard: We have been working to develop varieties of rice, for instance, that can help withstand flooding. It’s a complex issue but in Ethiopia and Kenya, with social programs in place, you’re seeing governments who are better able to cope with drought. It is frightening but we have a lot we can do.

This session was streamed live at opportunity.org/live. Visit opportunity.org/live throughout the conference to watch the sessions live.

Highlights from Dr. Howard’s presentation

Dr. Julie Howard, of USAID's Feed the Future Initiative

I have always wanted to work to implement a different kind of development assistance, one that works with NGOs, and was doing so starting ten years ago. Then, almost a year ago, administrator Shah called me and asked me to be involved in this initiative, to come into government, with my outsider’s perspective.

Today, our challenge at Feed the Future is that almost a billion people are undernourished. We know how much our food supplies have to increase. We are committed to doing something about food security. And in 2007 and 2008, when we saw global food crises, we had never seen crises like that before, and we saw that we had to address them.

The U.S. had been giving aid, but we had been out of the business of teaching people to fish, which is what we needed to do. But in 2009, President Obama pledged $3.5 billion over three years, and other G8 countries contributed too.

But it’s about more than money. Countries need to get directly involved with the programs, and they need to collaborate with each other, to truly meet challenges and accomplish their goals.

We want inclusive agriculture growth for women and men. We want that to translate to improved nutrition for all. We are implementing these principles in part by focusing on fewer goals–we’re working in 19 countries that have demonstrated that they are documenting the effectiveness of their programs.

We are working on long-term research to combat climate change and drought, as well as increase productivity of cereal crops and legumes.

Today we’re also transforming partnerships with the private sector. And just last week, we announced a partnership with PepsiCo. We’re very excited to be able to innovate to end hunger and increase food security through partnerships like this.

We hope to be able to continue to discuss this work with you this weekend and in the future. Thank you.

A bit about Dr. Howard

Dr. Julie Howard was appointed in March 2011 as the U.S. Government’s deputy coordinator for development for Feed the Future, President Obama’s global hunger and food security initiative. Julie leads communication, donor and NGO engagement, interagency coordination, and initiative-wide strategy and policy development, as well as overall Feed the Future budget management and monitoring and evaluation. Since 2003, she has served as executive director and chief executive officer of the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa, an independent nonprofit coalition dedicated to increasing the level and effectiveness of U.S. assistance and private investment through research, dialogue and advocacy.

This session was streamed live at opportunity.org/live. Visit opportunity.org/live throughout the conference to watch the sessions live.

Here are just a few of the plenary and breakout session speakers on Friday and Saturday who will share their expertise and experiences in reducing global poverty—and inspire you to become part of something big:

• Steven Levy, author, “In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives”
• Bill Draper, author, “The Startup Game: Inside the Partnership Between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs”
• Laura Pincus Hartman, professor of business ethics, DePaul University, and director of external partnerships, Zynga.org
• Ambassador Tony Hall, executive director, Alliance to End Hunger
• Dr. Julie Howard, U.S. government deputy coordinator for development, Feed the Future
• Reeta Roy, president and CEO, The MasterCard Foundation
• Daryl Collins, author, “Portfolios of the Poor”
• John Ortberg, pastor and author, “When the Game is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box”
• Jeffrey Spector, chief of staff for Melinda Gates, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

For a complete schedule of speakers, click here.

Watch our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter for reminders and updates on the sessions at #OIC2011. Plus, subscribe to the Opportunity Blog for our complete coverage of the conference breakout and plenary sessions Friday and Saturday.

Visit opportunity.org/live to watch the live stream.

The press gather in preparation for Pres. Obama's remarks at the afternoon plenary session

The plenary session closed with remarks from President Barack Obama, who thanked CGI participants for the amazing work they are doing, saying, “Hundreds of millions of people have been touched by what you have done here.”

The session also featured a panel discussion on “Sustainable Consumption: Redefining Business as Usual,” moderated by Gro Harlem Brundtland, Former Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Norway. Participants included Bob Diamond, Chief Executive, Barclays; Viviane Victorine Kinyaga, Director, Desert Research Foundation of Namibia; Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO, PepsiCo; and Paul Polman, Chief Executive Officer, Unilever.

More than ever before, the world’s population–and its ever-increasing demand for products and services–is putting pressure on the planet. In an era of rapidly depleting and finite resources, businesses and society have the opportunity to reframe how value is created and how consumption acts as a driver for economic growth. This panel session sought to explore how design decisions at the highest levels can drive consumer choices, and innovative marketing and branding can encourage consumer demand to drive more sustainable supply, addressing these opportunities and challenges through the lens of the global food business. The current food system has resulted in high prices paid by the natural environment and by consumer health. Therefore, the panel explored how to ensure sustainability and  how to evaluate what is driving consumption patterns to determine both ethical and profitable responses to these challenges.

Pres. Obama addresses attendees at the plenary session

Watch video of the entire plenary session by clicking here.

Today, Sept. 21st, is also the International Day of Peace, so it is apropos that USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, speaking at the CGI breakout session “Securing Global Nutrition” earlier today, called for all countries to live up to their commitments to support agricultural development in Africa, not only as a moral obligation, but to increase global security and economic prosperity.

While hunger and undernutrition remain persistent problems for the poorest populations of the world, inequities in food production and distribution have most recently been dramatically pronounced in the food crisis in the Horn of Africa. Events such as the drought that has ravaged livestock and crop production in East Africa will continue to create extreme nutrition shortfalls if the overarching challenges to food production and consumption are not addressed. Working to meet the needs for food distribution in times of emergency, it is essential that governments, businesses, and NGOs also collaborate for long-term nutritional security. Dr. Shah also warned that if we do not help to create a stable environment in the Horn of Africa, the area will become more vulnerable to extremist groups.

Playing the Students of the World video about Banking on Education

Other participants in the breakout session, which was moderated by The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, included Vinita Bali, Managing director and CEO of Britannia Industries Ltd.; Gebisa Ejeta, Distinguished Professor of Agronomy at Purdue University; and Yolanda Kakabadse, President, WWF International. Kristof said that in the last few decades, the U.S. government and development community had “dropped the ball on agriculture and nutrition.” Shah discussed the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future program, which reverses the trend and calls for country-led agricultural development and partnerships to reduce poverty and increase access to food.

Tune in tomorrow for the last day of CGI 2011, including the plenary session “Engaging Boys and Men as Allies for Long-term Change,” with remarks by Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, U.S. Department of State; and featuring philanthropists, world leaders and thought leaders such as Muhammad Yunus, chairman, Yunus Centre; Paul Kagame, President of the Republic of Rwanda, and more. As well as a number of breakout and special sessions on a number of issues related to gender, technology, business and the environment.

Watch live streaming video of all CGI sessions via CGI’s Facebook page. Follow along with CGI on Twitter at #CGI2011.

Bill Gates came to the Chicago Council’s Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security with a confession. “I’ve never been a farmer,” he said. “Until recently, I rarely set foot on farm.”

Farmer Gates, no. But Innovator Gates, certainly.

So this was one of his messages to a standing room crowd. In ending hunger through agriculture development, innovation is the key.

First, the challenge:

“Right now,” he said. “the average farmer in sub-Saharan Africa gets just over a ton of cereal per acre. An Indian farmer gets twice that; a Chinese farmer five times that; an American farmer seven times that. Why is there this huge disparity? Farmers in other regions have tools and techniques and resources that African farmers do not. By offering farming families in Africa and South Asia those advantages, the least productive farms can come closer to the most productive.”

“How,” he asked, “can the world help the poorest farmers grow and sell more? The key is in innovation – combining the best of what’s worked in the past with new breakthroughs, customized to the needs of small farmers.

“Innovation in seeds brings small farmers new high-yield crops that can grow in a drought, survive in a flood and resist pests and disease.

“Innovation in markets offers small farmers access to reliable customers.

“Innovation in agriculture techniques helps farmers increase productivity while preserving the environment – with approaches like no-till farming, rainwater harvesting and drip irrigation.

“Innovation in foreign assistance means that donors now support national plans that provide farming families with new seeds, tools, techniques and markets. This approach is reducing overlap and keeping developing countries in the lead.”

Innovation needs good ideas, and money. Here, Gates said, “The U.S. has a pivotal role to play in helping farming families lift themselves out of poverty and hunger. At the same time, of course, we have a big budget deficit and foreign assistance is an easy target for reduction. We need to tell people over and over why this spending is a good investment, why it’s worth it even in tight economic times.”

First, he said, “these investments are going to countries committed to change.”

“The second reason agricultural investments are worthwhile,” he added, “is that farming is a business. As you provide poor farmers business assistance through new tools and technology and access to markets and capital, it allows them to move to self-sufficiency with the help of market forces.”

Roger Thurow, author and Senior Fellow of Global Agriculture & Food Policy, speaks about hunger and food security at Opportunity's Fall 2010 Microfinance Conference.

“The third reason agricultural development is a smart investment is how effective it is. In country after country, these approaches have improved the livelihoods of small farmers while reducing poverty and increasing economic growth. It’s proving the point again and again: helping poor farming families grow more crops is the world’s single most powerful lever for reducing poverty and hunger.”

These comments from Bill Gates, whose foundation with his wife Melinda has committed $1.7 billion to help farming families over the last five years, suggest again, as we’ve often said in this column, that we have arrived at a moment of potential opportunity that shouldn’t be squandered. The budget crisis, he suggested, shouldn’t be reason for the U.S. to cut back on its promises to increase agriculture development aid, to scale back its Feed the Future ambitions.

“This is the first stage of sweeping change for farming families in the poorest parts of the world,” Gates said. “We have an historic chance to help people and countries move from dependency to self-sufficiency–and fulfill the highest promise of foreign aid. In the past we’ve invested aid in Brazil and India and South Korea, and they are all now dynamic actors in the global economy–some even joining to help provide aid to others. This is our hope for the countries of Africa and South Asia as well.”

To read Thurow’s original post on the Global Food for Thought blog, click here. Follow the event on Twitter at #GADIsymposium.

Feed the Future–one of the most important programs to help build sustainable agriculture in the developing world–is now in jeopardy. In 2010, Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, announced the Obama administration’s global strategy to help 20 developing countries increase agricultural production, and reduce hunger and poverty. Current proposed budget cuts will slash Feed the Future and many other international and domestic hunger programs.

Support for Feed the Future has come from across the political spectrum. Writing from Malawi in a recent article about the budget debate, Michael Gerson, Washington Post columnist and former policy advisor for President George W. Bush, said the promotion of agriculture “is among the best examples of long-term, bootstrap development. It is the kind of foreign assistance that encourages enterprise and independence, and avoids the need for emergency famine relief.”

To raise awareness of the need to fund this and other crucial hunger programs, Opportunity International has joined HungerFast.org, a broad coalition of organizations led by Ambassador Tony Hall, a member of Opportunity’s Board of Advisors. Ambassador Hall has been fasting since March 28th to call attention to the one billion people worldwide who suffer from hunger–and the 25,000 who die each day from hunger-related causes.

Over the next decades, ensuring food security will become even more challenging. Experts say we will have to increase food production by 70% to feed a global population of nine billion people by 2050. Recently, Jacques Diouf, director general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), warned that countries are not doing enough to increase food production to meet rising demand and that the world could be headed for a global food crisis. We must now lay the groundwork for the future by investing in farmers and building viable, agricultural markets in developing economies.

Investing in a smallholder farmer in Africa is one way that you personally can help reduce hunger now and increase food security in the future. “Africa is capable of sustaining its food needs,” says John Magnay, Opportunity’s senior agricultural advisor. “But if you look at crop yields in Africa, they are at 40% of what they could be.”

Opportunity’s agricultural finance and rural savings initiatives give farmers, particularly women – who do roughly 70 percent of the world’s agricultural work– the tools they need to increase their crop production and family income, while helping to feed their communities.

Learn more below about Opportunity’s agricultural finance program, and join HungerFast.org to speak up for the hungry around the world.

Watch Opportunity’s Video, “Harvesting Hope”:

Lutacho, Kenya

I returned from a day in the field with Kenyan smallholder farmers last week to find these words from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack as the Newsbrief’s Quote of the Week:

As I travel around the world talking about American agriculture, the one thing that has struck me is how jealous the rest of the world is about extension, how they would love to have the capacity that we have in this country and often, unfortunately, take for granted, of the ability to reach out and gain very useful information and insights to improve productivity.

Exactly, I thought.

Roger Thurow, Global Food for Thought Blog

How the African farmers I had just visited cherished extension services that would bring to them the latest in technology and advice on how to best use it to increase food production. Extension agents were essential in spreading the agricultural revolutions in every part of the world: America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America. Everywhere except Africa. Government budgets didn’t have enough money to fund them, nor political will to insist that they do; international development agencies, in their negligence of agriculture, thought Africa, alone among the continents of the world, could do without them. As a result, the continent’s extension services fell into a woeful state during the past three decades of neglect of agriculture development. In many countries, if there were any extension agents, they did little extending; very few even had bicycles to go from farm to farm.

Secretary Vilsack’s quote continued:

We are trying to replicate that around the world. For global supplies to keep pace with global demands originating in emerging markets and to mitigate price volatility, we have got to embrace proven technologies, and extension can help us do that. It’s not just biotechnology. It’s also conservation tillage. It’s drip irrigation. It’s multiple cropping practices.

It’s planting seeds, one per hole. And spacing the seeds, and the rows, so the seeds will have room to grow without competition from other seeds for water, sun and soil nutrients.

It’s very basic knowledge like this, common practices among backyard gardeners everywhere in the rich world. But it was news to the farmers of western Kenya when Kennedy Wafula came by their farms with advice on how to plant to get better harvests.

He produced a piece of string with a knot tied every 25 centimeters. “Twenty-five. This is the distance between plants,” he told a group of farmers gathered under a big shade tree. “How far?”

“Twenty-five,” they shouted in unison.

He waved a stick that was 75 centimeters long. “Seventy-five,” Kennedy said. “That is the distance between rows.”

Thurow at the Fall 2010 Microfinance Conference.

“Seventy-five,” the farmers repeated.

Kennedy explained, “You dig a hole every 25 centimeters and put in one seed. Only one seed, so there is no competition between many seeds for the fertilizer and water and sun.”

Kennedy led the farmers to a small plot of land to practice the measuring and the preparation. As farmer Geoffrey Sitata followed, I asked him how he traditionally planted. “No measurement, we just scatter the seed,” he said. He made a motion with his right hand, as if throwing dice or tossing feed to chickens. That’s how he planted, scattering a fistful of precious seed willy-nilly. That’s how everybody planted. Nobody had ever come by the farm and told them there was a better, more productive way to do it.

Until Kennedy, a field manager for the One Acre Fund, stopped by. The One Acre Fund is an organization founded by American social entrepreneurs that works with 55,000 farm families in Kenya and Rwanda. One Acre’s main mission is to distribute to Africa’s farmers the simple technology and practical advice that have existed for decades but nobody ever bothered to deliver to African smallholder farmers. The result is that African yields for maize, wheat, rice and other staple crops lag far behind yields in the rich world. And that hunger and malnutrition blanket the African countryside. One Acre farmers are typically able to double or triple maize yields in one year.

Kennedy calls One Acre’s simple sequence of planting practices the “Obama method,” for the American president who is highly revered in western Kenya, where Barack Obama’s father grew up on a small farm. It is also appropriate in another way, for President Obama has made ending hunger through agriculture development a prime pillar of his foreign policy. His Feed the Future Initiative especially seeks to help Africa’s smallholder farmers by creating the conditions for them to be as productive as possible to feed their families, their communities and their countries.

Secretary Vilsack continued to tell those gathered at the USDA Forum in Washington [on Feb. 24, 2011]:

There are a variety of ways in which we can help the world do a better job of providing food to a growing population. So there are serious opportunities here for the United States to provide leadership, and we are prepared to do that.

Extending the knowledge of successful agriculture practices is one of those opportunities. Kenyan farmers often tell me, “Knowledge is power.” That is one form of power Africa is happy to see the U.S. wield.

Roger Thurow at Opportunity’s Microfinance Conference:

Over the past 10 days, we have been absorbing and reacting to developments around not just one, but two budgets that significantly affect global poverty reduction programs. After looking at both, however, you might conclude that they were headed in opposite directions, having far-reaching, but far different impacts on the lives of the world’s poor. And you would be correct.

Opportunity loan client Nuulu Nankya is an entrepreneur and teacher in Kampala, Uganda who is working her way out of poverty.

Last week, the House debated an appropriations measure that would finalize U.S. spending for FY2011–that’s this year, nearly half of which has gone by. As approved, the House bill cuts the International Affairs budget by 19% from FY2010 amounts with serious consequences for poverty programs. Resources for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria are slashed by $450 million and global development assistance is cut 30% below last year’s amount, placing the administration’s Feed the Future Initiative in great jeopardy.

Humanitarian aid supporting victims of emergencies and disasters around the world shrink by over 41% with food assistance falling to levels of a decade ago. For the Bush Administration’s signature program, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the $790 million appropriation is 29% below last year and the smallest budget the MCC has ever received.

In contrast, President Obama submitted his FY2012 budget to Congress on February 14, proposing a modest, but strategically targeted request for International Affairs next year. While the proposal represents a small 3% increase over FY2010 levels and provides substantial increases for operations and aid to the front line states of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, it also recommends important increases for poverty-focused activities and maintains that U.S. commitments support global challenges facing all nations. American support for the Global Fund would grow by 24%, the Global Health Initiative would increase by 11%, and resources for Feed the Future would put the initiative back on track.

Attention on the FY2011 budget now shifts to the Senate, which needs to take some action prior to the March 4 expiration of the existing continuing resolution (CR). Prospects are high for some sort of short term extension of the CR and the debate will continue. In the meantime, the President’s FY2012 request will take a back seat to these efforts to finalize FY2011 spending and to restore the crippling cuts to global poverty programs passed by the House. Look for frequent updates [on the ONE Blog] on the “Tale of two budgets.”

If you would like to take action, contact your representative and let them know that fighting global poverty needs to remain a strategic priority.

To read the original post on the ONE Blog, click here.