As I posted below, today is the kickoff of the World Food Summit in Rome. This weekend, the Director General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Jacques Diouf, undertook a 24-hour fast to protest the astonishing figure of over 1 billion hungry people around the world. The FAO is also currently running a campaign against global hunger, which you should check out at www.1billionhungry.org.

Today marks the opening of the World Food Summit on Global Food Security which is being held in Rome through Wednesday. The meeting, which brings together officials from the UN food security-related institutions (like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] and the World Food Program [WFP]) and an estimated 60 heads of state, is designed to garner political will to address global food insecurity. The UN FAO has asked those in attendance at the Summit to commit $44 billion per year in official development assistance (ODA) for agricultural development, and to adopt 2025 as a deadline for eradicating global hunger.

Over 1 billion people worldwide suffer from food insecurity, and the challenge ahead will only be exacerbated by climate change, population growth, and rural-urban migration. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon cautioned today that food security cannot be tackled without addressing climate change. “Food security and climate change are deeply interconnected,” he said. “Today’s event is critical, so is Copenhagen.” The FAO predicts that we will need to grow 70 percent more food by 2050. At the same time, however, farmers, particularly in places like Africa where crops are rain-fed and rainfall is becoming increasingly erratic, could see drastic declines in harvests.

In the lead-up to the Summit last week there were concerns about attendance and outcomes. News reports indicated that the Summit might not set measurable targets for addressing food insecurity, and a draft communiqué released last week by the FAO contained promising language, but also lacked specific and measurable goals. Thus far at the Summit leaders have only reaffirmed the first Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty by 2015; it seems unlikely that the UN’s more ambitious targets will be ratified.

In the next few days we’ll update you about happenings at the Summit. The coverage of this event will wrap up our Food Security in Focus series. We hope you’ve enjoyed the content here on the website as much as we’ve enjoyed tracking and writing it! And we will, of course, continue to keep you posted about news in the agriculture and food security sector.

Last week leaders from the United States and European Union met in Washington DC for the regular US-EU Summit.

The team at ONE has reviewed the summit’s declaration [PDF] and picked out some of the key points.

Overall the document contains some very positive language on the need to work together to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015 and development has been ratcheted up the agenda as a focus for cooperation. There’s also a separate annex on Development. The main point is that the US and EU want to work together with more urgency towards the MDG Summit and up to 2015:

‘we recognize that a coordinated international effort is needed to assist developing countries accelerate progress towards the MDGs’

The Declaration itself pledges to re-launch US-EU dialogue on development, and the first meeting to re-launch of this dialogue will happen at ministerial level very soon. Ministerial level meetings will thereafter be annual, with meetings of the re-launched High Level Consultative Group on Development to be held in between.

The Annex to the declaration outlines 3 areas for close cooperation between the US and EU:

• Food security and agricultural development: initial focus on Africa, will join efforts in a Global Partnership for Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition; support for the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme.
• Climate change: focus on country-driven adaptation strategies and a pledge to concentrate on the development aspects of climate change.
• MDGs: ‘recognizes that a coordinated international effort is needed to assist developing countries accelerate progress towards the MDGs’. As well as Overseas Development Assistance, policy coherence for development, aid effectiveness and new innovative financing mechanisms mentioned.There are plentiful references to measuring outputs and results of development cooperation as well as a focus on Accra and aid effectiveness.

The declaration comes at a timely moment at the beginning of a new European Commission and Parliamentary mandate in Brussels, and gives us a good kick-off to help ensure that achievement of the MDGs remains high on the political agenda in both Brussels and Washington DC.

-Eloise Todd

In Zambia, a rainy season has raised fears of a cholera outbreak. To help prevent a cholera outbreak, UNICEF and its partners have launched a new advocacy campaign called “Your Life is in Your Hands.”

The key to the campaign’s effectiveness, according to UNICEF, is that it relies on peer-to-peer advocacy, meaning that children and young people become effective ambassadors in spreading the importance of good hygiene to their peers. The campaign is being rolled out “through town–hall meetings for school children, follow-up events in schools, radio public service announcements and a UNICEF cartoon character named SOPO.”

You can read more about “Your Life is in Your Hands” here.

Today is World Pneumonia Day and you can watch the Global Pneumonia Summit live right now.

Child advocates from around the world are gathering in New York City to hear the latest on how we can raise the profile of child pneumonia and get policymakers everywhere to act.

Speakers include:

• Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to the United Nations’ Secretary-General
• Singer-songwriter and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Angélique Kidjo
• ABC News’ senior health and medical editor Dr. Richard Besser
• WHO and UNICEF present a new report, the Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia, which provides a road map for preventing and treat child pneumonia in the world’s poorest countries.
• And leading global health experts, philanthropists, faith-based leaders, corporate representatives and child advocates to begin to change the way the world responds to the #1 killer of children—pneumonia.

Earlier this week, UNICEF, the WHO, and the World Bank issued a joint report on the state of the world’s vaccines. The report found that while more children are being vaccinated than ever before, nearly 24 million of the world’s most at-risk children are still not receiving life-saving vaccinations.

Dr. Mickey Chopra, UNICEF Chief of Health and Associate Director of Programmes discusses the report in this short clip. For those who might not have time to read the full findings, I thought this would be of value:

UNICEF, the WHO and the World Bank came together today to announce that while more children are being vaccinated than ever before, nearly 24 million of the world’s most at-risk children are still not receiving life-saving vaccinations. Reaching these children will require an estimated $1 billion each year.

The announcement came today after new data was released in the The State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunization, a report jointly-authored by the three organizations. The report found that 2008 was a record high for global vaccinations, with more than 106 million children immunized. The report acknowledges that donor support for the GAVI Alliance (a public-private partnership launched in 2000 to increase access to new and underused vaccines) played a large role in making this possible. More than 200 million children have been immunized with vaccines funded by GAVI and over 3.4 million premature deaths have been averted.

This comes on the heels of an announcement last month by UNICEF that in 2008, child deaths dropped below 9 million (to 8.8 million) for the first time, thanks in large part to immunizations, the use of insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria and Vitamin A supplementation. Yet more than 3 million of the 8.8 million children who still die every year are dying from two main killers: pneumonia and diarrhea. New vaccines exist that could prevent the majority of these deaths, but they are still not available in the world’s poorest countries.

Over the coming months and years, GAVI Alliance will be the main vehicle for getting these new vaccines to the countries that need them most. With increased donor support, GAVI partners plans to introduce the vaccine against pneumococcus, the bacterium that causes pneumonia, in 42 countries and the vaccine against rotavirus, which causes diarrhea, in 44 countries by 2015.

Together, these could prevent an estimated 11 million child deaths by 2030. Here at ONE we’re looking forward to helping GAVI, donors and other partners to make this plan a reality.

Today is Global Handwashing Day. And even in America, with soap and safe water easily accessible, it never hurts to remind everyone to do what mom used to say: wash your hands with soap. Even Elmo is on board, teaching kids to wash their hands often, for 20 seconds, with soap, while singing a song like Happy Birthday.

And for good reason. The truth of the matter is that handwashing with soap protects from several common diseases, including pneumonia and diarrhea. While these diseases aren’t fatal for most of us, for people in developing countries, especially children under the age of five, they can be.

Twenty-four thousand children under the age of five die every day from causes that we know how to prevent—causes such as diarrhea. In fact, diarrheal disease is second only to pneumonia as the leading killer of children worldwide and dirty hands make it easy for diarrheal disease to spread. Poor hygiene, lack of access to sanitation and unsafe drinking water together are responsible for 88 percent of diarrheal disease worldwide. Handwashing with soap, when done before eating and after using the toilet or changing a diaper, can cut that by nearly half. It’s a simple act that can save lives. We envision a day when that 24,000 unnecessary, daily deaths will be reduced to zero. We believe in zero.

A report released by UNICEF and the World Health Organization yesterday highlights the important reality that only by focusing on the preventable and treatable diseases that plague children of the developing world—like diarrhea—can we reduce global child mortality. The good news is that we know what works, and the measures to prevent and treat diarrheal disease are simple, effective, and cost-efficient.

Worldwide 1 billion people do not have access to safe water for drinking, let alone for handwashing. Child health advocates like me have long cried out for investments to assure children’s human right to be healthy and to have clean water. They also need investments that help them apply these interventions to their advantage, and yes, teaching children how to wash their hands is part of that.

In 2000, the United Nations set a challenge to all nations to commit to reducing global poverty and improving the health and welfare of people everywhere by 2015. This included a promise to stem child deaths by two-thirds.

We are well past the halfway point to 2015. Investments in health and development have made some progress toward reducing the number of child deaths, but now is the time to ensure that all of the tools we know to be effective in controlling disease throughout the western world are also used in a global effort to fight diarrheal disease. Prioritizing an integrated approach that includes handwashing with soap to control the spread of diarrheal disease is key in achieving Millennium Development Goal 4, reducing the under-5 mortality rate by two-thirds by 2015. The MDGs should be our guide, because children are at their heart.

Today is Global Handwashing Day. So, when you put down this paper, don’t forget to wash your hands. Oh sure, if you forget, you’ll survive. But remember others – especially children – around the world aren’t so lucky. Their well-being deserves our continued attention because all children deserve to celebrate their next birthday.

-Caryl M. Stern, President and CEO of The U.S. Fund for UNICEF

Actor Orlando Bloom, who has worked with UNICEF for several years now in Nepal, Russia, and Sarajevo, has been appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

According to Ann M. Veneman, UNICEF’s executive director, Bloom will be a “voice for vulnerable children” in a role that “helps build momentum to improve the lives of children around the world.”

You can read more about the appointment on UNICEF’s Field Notes here.

Oh, these UN weeks. Every year when the UN General Assembly meets (and this year, the Clinton Global Initiative and the G20 are putting their heads together, too), advocates for the world’s poor try to build momentum towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight targets designed to reduce global poverty and disease by 2015. In years past, we’ve entered these discussions with hugely complicated problems to solve. But this year is a bit different. There is big progress to report on MDG 4 – reducing preventable childhood deaths.

Last Thursday, UNICEF released a report announcing that the number of children dying each year before their fifth birthday had dropped to 8.8 million—the lowest number on record (an achievement that flew under most of the major medias radar screens). And while this is still 8.8 million too many deaths, it’s down from 12.5 million deaths in 1990. That means that doctors, nurses, community health workers, educators—even politicians and donors—have helped prevent 10,000 children from dying each day. TEN THOUSAND! One of these saved sons or daughters could hit upon the next big life-saving idea.

But there’s a catch. Right now, we actually don’t need any new big idea to take a significant step forward. Three million of the 8.8 million children are dying from things that we know how to prevent and treat: pneumonia and diarrhea. In the next year, vaccines for pneumococcal disease and rotavirus—two of the main causes of the diseases—will be introduced at approximately $7 a piece, a price cheap enough to realistically be distributed in the developing world. So we have the life-saving vaccines, and we know what it takes to distribute. Now we just need the money to do it.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI)—an innovative financing organization that funds the purchasing and distribution of vaccines—will be largely responsible for purchasing the pneumonia and rotavirus vaccines. And while they’re running short on funds, exciting progress was made during the busy UN week.

At a UN event yesterday afternoon, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and World Bank President Robert Zoellick announced a landmark $5.3 billion international deal that would tackle women’s and children’s health in the developing world—and save an estimated 10 million lives. The $5.3 billion investment, which marks the culmination of a year’s work by the Taskforce on Innovative Financing for Health Systems, includes:

• New commitments by leaders of Nepal, Malawi, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone to expand access to health services
• A $1 billion expansion of the International Finance Facility for Immunization (IFFIm)
• A new mechanism for making voluntary contributions when buying airline tickets, expected to raise up to $3.2 billion by 2015
• $515 million for results-based funding health programs
• $360 million worth of debt conversions
• Launch of a value-added (VAT) tax credit pilot, expected to raise up to $220 million a year
• The commitment to explore a second Advance Market Commitment for life-saving vaccines

While this exciting announcement is not going to fulfill all of GAVI’s financing needs, it hopefully sets an important precedent that other donors will soon follow. It would be quite an achievement if at next year’s meeting of the UN General Assembly, there is even more good news to report.

The lives of 3 million children depend on it.

-Josh Lozman