This is proof that our voices are being heard on Capitol Hill. One by one we’re letting our elected officials know that programs like “Feed the Future” really can break the cycle of famine for good and end extreme poverty in the developing world— all for less than 1% of the US budget. Check out Senator Durbin’s full statement below, and please leave him a message in the comments:

Thank you for contacting me regarding the drought that is affecting East Africa on behalf of my constituents from the State of Illinois. I appreciate hearing from you.

Since July 21, 2011, the United Nations has declared “famine level food insecurity” in a number of regions in Somalia. The area is expected to expand in the coming weeks and months as a result of a continuing lack of rain.

Nearly half of Somalia’s estimated 10 million people require humanitarian aid, and millions more across East Africa face famine and security issues.

This problem could become significantly worse if not addressed as soon as possible. Recent estimates have indicated that almost 30,000 children under the age of 5 have died as a result of the famine in Somalia. These are the innocent victims of drought, instability, and lawlessness.

The United States is the largest bilateral donor of emergency assistance to this growing crisis in East Africa. We have already responded with more than $431 million in food and non-food emergency assistance this year, and Secretary Clinton just announced an additional $28 million in aid for people in Somalia and for Somali refugees in Kenya.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) also has been working on the ground in the region, coordinating with bilateral and multilateral organizations to aid in the relief efforts. President Obama’s Feed the Future program will be vitally important to break the cycle of hunger and food insecurity as well, addressing the root causes through innovative agricultural advances. This program is modeled on a bill I sponsored with my colleagues, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana and Senator Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, called the Global Food Security Act.

The United States must continue to show moral leadership even in a time of stretched budgets. Emergency assistance programs cost us little but have a significant impact, potentially saving the lives of thousands of people in need around the world.

I will continue to work for adequate funding for humanitarian assistance programs as the Senate considers the Fiscal Year 2012 budget, and monitor the crisis in East Africa.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to stay in touch.

Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
United States Senator

On the two-year anniversary of the L’Aquila commitments, which saw leaders promise to invest $22 billion in agriculture development, ONE’s new report ‘Agriculture Accountability‘ finds that donors have only delivered a fifth of the money promised with just one year to go until the deadline. As well as neglecting their financial commitments the report found countries are not demonstrating the political will needed to prevent future food crises.

The report’s key findings include:

• Overall donors have met only 22% of the financial pledges made at L’Aquila in 2009.
• Canada and Italy have delivered more than two-thirds of their pledges. France, the UK, Germany and the US need to substantial increase the funds they distribute in order to meet their commitments.
• Donors are not taking on the challenges of ensuring effective agriculture aid is delivered with the political will and momentum needed to tackle poverty and chronic hunger.

At the 2009 L’Aquila G8 Summit, the G8 and 5 other donors promised to: (1) deliver the funds within 3 years; (2) agree to a set of principles to guide how they would spend this money; and (3) remain transparent and accountable to their commitments. Twenty-seven countries and 15 international organisations signed a joint statement of commitment, bringing into existence the Aquila Food Security Initiative.

Yet two years on world leaders are guilty of letting slide their promises to fight the root causes of hunger, in particular very low agricultural productivity in regions like sub-Saharan Africa.  We should not need a food crisis to wake us up to the need to not just give food aid now, but also deliver on the promised partnership with African leaders, citizens and the private sector to boost yields across the region.

Fortunately with food security on the agenda of the G20 later this year there is a real opportunity for a new partnership to turn this around. With the right support Africans can both feed themselves and export to the world, helping them fight hunger and poverty and helping us all with lower food prices. The US Government has calculated for example that 40 million poor farming families across the world, most of them living on less than $2 per day, would be able to increase their incomes by 250% if the L’Aquila commitments are met. So delivering the L’Aquila promises and investing in food production is a win-win all round.

Find out more in the report Agriculture Accountability

The multilateral agriculture fund known as GAFSP, or the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, has selected more country-led programs to invest in!

A few days ago, GAFSP announced that it would disburse $160 million to fund agriculture programs in Cambodia, Liberia, Nepal and Tajikistan. All of the programs are part of countries’ national agricultural investment plans, which means they are more effective and more in line with the actual needs of the people in those countries. You may remember Samuel Gatembeyi, a Rwandan farmer that ONE interviewed last month. He is living proof that GAFSP programs work. Like Samuel, farmers in Cambodia, Liberia, Nepal and Tajikistan now will also have the opportunity to benefit from GAFSP programs.

In Cambodia, $39.1 million in GAFSP funds will support increased productivity and crop diversity in areas with food shortages and economic depression.

In Liberia, $46.5 million in GAFSP funds will increase the incomes of smallholder famers, particularly women and youth, through sustainable irrigable land expansion, sustainable soil and tree conservation, and improvement of market access. It will also build capacity for smart agricultural research and agricultural advisory services, or extension.

Nepal, $46.5 million in GAFSP funds will enhance household incomes and access to food in the poorest and most food-insecure regions. They will do this through increased agricultural productivity, household incomes, and awareness about health and nutrition.

In Tajikistan, $27.9 million in GAFSP funds will boost access to food through increased crop production resulting from improved sustainable irrigation, drainage infrastructure, and improved water management policies.

The fund’s Steering Committee selected the winning proposals based on the recommendations of an independent review conducted by global agriculture experts. In addition to addressing strong needs in country, the successful proposals showed that they contributed to comprehensive national agriculture strategies that involve technically sound interventions to increase agricultural productivity and a commitment to invest country’s own resources in the agriculture sector.

During our last budget campaign, ONE members helped secure more than $100 million in US funding for GAFSP in 2011. However, until the US delivers its 2011 money to GAFSP and until other donors contribute, the Fund will be empty, and no more programs will be funded. Thus, we are going to need to take action again soon for GAFSP, not only in the United States but also in European countries like the United Kingdom, Germany and France, none of whom have made pledges to date.

Someone asked me today whether GAFSP could be like GAVI but for agriculture, but I don’t know what to tell them. Do countries place a priority on reducing hunger sustainably through smart investments in small-scale agriculture? Can ONE members help galvanize the support needed? What do you think?

This week, ONE, with partners ActionAid, Alliance to End Hunger, Women Thrive and others, hosted a reception on Capitol Hill to celebrate the recent successes of US investments in agriculture to strengthen global food security.

Following the Chicago Council’s Annual Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security, the reception was a huge success. It brought together Congress, the Administration, civil society and agriculture researchers to raise the profile of the multilateral Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), and bring recognition to the great work that the US government and our partners have been doing to help improve the lot of small-scale farmers in Africa.

We were honored to have leading anti-hunger advocate Ambassador Tony Hall emcee the event. There were also keynote addresses made by Samuel Gatembeyi, a small-scale farmer from Rwanda, assistant secretary of international markets and development at the US Department of the Treasury Marisa Lago, and Julie Howard, deputy coordinator of Feed the Future.

Despite a busy voting schedule last night, the event was attended by six members of Congress, including a host committee made up of Representatives Frank Wolf, Jim McGovern, Betty McCollum, and Jo Ann Emerson:

During the event’s keynote speeches, Rwanda was a country on people’s tongues. Attendees had the rare opportunity to hear directly from small-scale farmer Samuel Gatembeyi. Samuel leads a group of farmers in the village of Kavumu, Rwanda, and he told the story of how his life changed as a result of an agriculture program.

For the longest time, he was unable to grow anything on his hilly land, but now he, his family and his community are benefiting from a Government of Rwanda initiative to address soil erosion by making terraces in the hillside and using better farming techniques. Thanks to the US and other donors, the soil erosion project will be scaled up by the multilateral GAFSP in partnership with USAID and the Government of Rwanda, so that more of Samuel’s countrymen can learn to farm better and feed their families on a reliable basis.

When it was her turn to speak, Julie Howard made clear that Samuel’s story was not by chance. Rwanda was the first country to complete their CAADP national agricultural investment plan and the first country to work together with the US government and finish a plan for how the US should best spend its Feed the Future resources to help Rwandan become food secure.

Assistant Secretary Marisa Lago pointed out some of the more technical aspects of GAFSP that make it such a great investment –- its transparency, its strict monitoring and evaluation, and its inclusion of host governments like Rwanda in its decision-making process. The US government has committed to making a $100 million contribution to the fund this year, bringing it to one-third of what it promised at the fund’s inception.

It’s so important to reinforce what our champions are doing on Capitol Hill. The entire federal budget is under fire, and so few people realize that aid is less than 1 percent of the budget. Let’s not let them forget that we support their brave and honorable efforts. Let’s not let them forget that we support their brave and honorable efforts.

We began our trip to Malawi at a research station that developed improved seed varieties to counter devastating disease and drought. Many of those plant varieties developed at Chitedze Research Station are sold to Funwe Seed Farm to produce quality seed for the surrounding community.

Funwe’s packaged and certified seed is sold to farmers in agro-dealer shops, which is where we came upon Mrs. Flora Kahumbe. Flora owns two agro-dealer shops near Monkey Bay, Malawi, at the south end of Lake Malawi. She was trained by RUMARK, a local NGO that gets support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. RUMARK makes sure that agro-dealers like Flora know about proper storage for seeds and chemicals, safe application of crop-protection chemicals like pesticides and the appropriate ways of applying the right types of fertilizer for maximum effect.

Yet, Flora is more than just a shop-owner; she’s really almost an extension agent that provides valuable knowledge to farmers on how to get the most out of their seed. With three employees in each store, Flora is creating stable employment in her community and ensuring that the seed she sells does its best to feed Malawi’s growing mouths.

Rosette ravishes crops like peanuts or “groundnuts” as they’re called in Malawi like the plague – its proliferating brown spots spread indiscriminately from plant to plant disregarding property lines. Every year Malawian farmers lose 21% of groundnut crops to this deadly pestilence – or approximately $9 million. In weeks a year’s investment rots under the scourge of these fatal marks.

To rescue these and other crops, the Chitedze Research Station (funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) is researching and developing new seed varieties that will be resistant to drought and disease. Investments in agriculture research and development averages a 43% return on investment and growth in agriculture is twice as effective at reducing poverty as growth in other economic sectors.

Stephen asked her to “make a case for humanity,” and she replied, “Maybe you are rich enough, Mr. Colbert to afford everything you need… but high prices are affecting people all around the world.” She noted that high food prices are affecting not just people in developing countries, but consumers here in the U.S. who buy much of their food from multinational food companies, for which corn is a major ingredient of many of their products. In true policy wonk fashion, she also pointed to a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report that indicated that the steep rise in wheat prices was indeed a major factor in recent riots the riots in Tunisia, where rioting citizens were initially seen waving baguettes in the air.

To that, Colbert replied, “Well then, shouldn’t people be thanking, me, the speculator, for bringing democracy to countries around the world?” It is an interesting question, and it leads me to ask myself, have we been unconsciously as a society excusing the impacts of high prices because dictatorships have crumbled as a result of them? Or maybe it’s just that we’ve been distracted by the unrest while millions of people have slipped into poverty and hunger due to high food prices. Not to say that the unrest does not deserve some of our attention, but why are we not outraged that 44 million more people now go to bed hungry compared to this time last year? Hunger is easy to forget, but I hope that you, as ONE a member, won’t forget what we can do to help.

Please read more about agriculture and food issues on ONE’s blog.

This was one of the lessons from Wednesday’s roundtable discussion on the Hill “Price Shocks and Global Instability”, which was organized by ONE along with several other development and advocacy organizations.

“We must make sure that the cure is not worse than the disease”, explained Allan Jury, director of the UN World Food Program’s US Relations Office. Jury described the WFP’s five point strategy for coping with high food prices, which includes a strong focus on social safety nets to ensure that the poorest people have enough to eat, as well as the promotion of smallholder and women farmers to build resilience in the long term.

“Lessons have been learned from the 2008 crisis”, noted USAID’s Susan Bradley, who explained that the government’s Feed The Future program has a regional focus to improve transparency and grain transport in times of low supply.

Perhaps, then, we should be confident that donor countries will be able to cushion the most vulnerable from spiking prices this time around?

We’re kind of in love with this: researchers at the University of Illinois have come up with a way to teach sustainable development education to those in Africa, despite literacy or language barriers. Using two minute animated clips that can be sent and downloaded via cell phone, these videos depict animated characters demonstrating how to do various agricultural tasks. The videos cover a range of topics, from teaching viewers in Haiti (in light of recent cholera spikes) how to make water safe for drinking and cooking to how a farmer in Nigeria can protect his crops from insects.

As University of Illinois professor and development member Barry Pittendrigh says, “This is a very different paradigm from some other current development projects, where US-based educators are flown to another part of the world, interact with people in the field for a few weeks to several months, and leave. From a financial perspective, this is a much cheaper way to do international development.” Cheaper, no language barriers involved, and widely accessible? Sounds good to us!

Big thanks to ONE friend Jaclyn Schiff for sharing this with us!

Food prices are high again. In December 2010, prices — according the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s measurement of a group of food commodities — soared higher than the peak of the 2008 food prices. While new figures have not been released, reports are saying that prices for staple foods in developing countries like rice and wheat are climbing and the suspicious absence of rioting is starting to reverse. Riots in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen and Pakistan might just be the start for a tumultuous year. But while these riots were not triggered by high food prices -– high food prices certainly only add to citizens’ gripes with their governments.

There are a number of factors at play: Adverse weather is driving grim grain projections in South America and the US, increasing demands for biofuels made from food crops, oil surpassing $100 a barrel for the first time since October 2008, expectations that Russia’s export bans will be extended beyond 2011 and that others are starting to hoard or panic-buy. All this suggests that prices will continue to climb. And while the G20 debates the role of financial speculation in influencing food prices more hungry people could take to the streets.

But more importantly, hungry people don’t need to be hungry. Hunger is a symptom of poverty. First of all, there’s enough food in this world to feed everyone, it’s just not equitably distributed. Where food may be available, many people also just don’t have the money to buy enough to eat. Those that farm for a living often don’t have the resources to grow enough to sell to afford basic necessities, including food. Matter of fact, most people who experience hunger don’t have enough money to buy food, rather than that there isn’t enough food for them to eat. So, it’s not just about staving off hunger, but also promoting better nutrition where people are less vulnerable to disease and infection, and building rural economies. So, addressing the root cause of poverty will help solve the hunger problem along with many others.

Yet, “we” seem fixated on the causes of high and rising food prices and debating what to do about them, rather than enabling poor people’s economic development so that their pocketbooks can handle the ups and downs in food prices. Whether these high prices are here for the short or long-term, it pushes people into poverty and makes it just that much harder for others to climb out. In dire cases, particularly for children, it can lead to under-nutrition that has irreversible life-time consequences and even lead to death.

So, let’s put a little less effort into trying to point a finger at one price driver –- be it climate change, biofuels, trade measures, financial speculation or just good old supply and demand –- and put a little more effort in trying to do something about it. The food crisis in 2008 promoted global leaders to commit $22.5 billion to invest in agriculture and food security, a third of which was additional to existing aid budgets, but nearly 3 years later, what have they done? According to the donors themselves, without any third-party verification, they had disbursed only $6.5 billion of the $22.5 in April 2010. And now? It’s unclear. Especially with respect to European donors who haven’t been very forthcoming about their aid budgets for agriculture as of yet. And in the US, budget debates are very worrying. In a worst case scenario, budgets for the Feed the Future Initiative will drop dramatically and the funding that the US pledged to the Global Food Security and Agriculture Program, a newly created multilateral fund for agriculture, could disappear.

Though, one thing we do know is that Africa hasn’t been hit as hard this time around by high prices -– at least not yet. Why? Well, the World Bank says that greater investments in agriculture that improve productivity so that African countries don’t rely so much on imported food have helped cushion the blow. Well, how do you like that? Investments in agriculture help poor countries deal with high food prices. Donors, national governments and private sector…are you listening? Smart investments in agriculture are what we need more of. While issues such as the impact of increased droughts, floods and changing rainfall patterns on food productivity or the behaviors of financial speculators will need to be addressed; we cannot ignore that no matter what, we need to invest in agriculture, in poor countries, and help the poorest of the poor if we’re going to reduce poverty and hunger.