International
G8
Obama, Bono, G8 leaders… and YOU!
Clear some space in your schedule this Friday for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security, a discussion on new activities to advance global agricultural development, food and nutrition security in Africa.
Bono and President Obama, at last year’s World AIDS Day event, will meet again at the Chicago Council’s Symposium on Global Agriculture. Photo credit: Ralph Alswang/ ONE.
This event is a dream come true for us here at ONE — we’ve been trying to “plant the seed” in the G8 to put sustainable global agriculture at the top of their agenda at this year’s summit. And now, thanks to this event, President Obama, G8 and African leaders, businesses, international organizations and civil society, Bono and more will have the opportunity to devote time and attention to this topic. Although we can’t be certain it will affect the outcomes of the Summit, we think it’s a great way to kick off the G8.
The best part? You’re invited to the event, and you can participate, too. The Chicago Council is livestreaming the day’s panels, discussions and events on their website. Feel free to drop in, leave and come back to the event whenever you wish, all from the comfort of your computer. Panelists and guest speakers will all be on standby, ready to answer your questions on Twitter — so be sure to follow @GlobalAgDev and direct your questions and comments to #globalag.
Here’s a list of some of the guests who will be attending:
President Barack Obama
His Excellency Dr. Boni Yayi, President of the Republic of Benin & Chairperson of the African Union
His Excellency Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister of Ethiopia
His Excellency John Atta Mills, President of Ghana
His Excellency Jakaya Kikwete, President of the United Republic of Tanzania
The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary, United States Department of State
The Honorable Rajiv Shah, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Bono, Co-Founder of ONE and (RED)
The Honorable Ertharin Cousin, Executive Director, UN World Food Programme
Dr. Kanayo F. Nwanze, President, International Fund for Agricultural Development
Ms. Josette Sheeran, Vice Chairman, World Economic Forum
And again, here’s how you can get involved:
- Watch the livestream of the event. It starts at 8 a.m. EDT. You don’t have to watch the whole thing, but make sure you keep it up in a tab on your browser so you can follow along. Find out which events you want to watch by checking out the agenda here.
- Follow live blog posts and analysis from Roger Thurow and other hunger experts at the Chicago Council’s Global Food For Thought blog.
- Ask questions to the panelists and guest speakers by tweeting at @globalagdev and using hashtag #globalag. They’ll be on the lookout for your questions, so you may get an answer from Josette Sheeran of the World Economic Forum or even Rajiv Shah of USAID!
I’ll be following along, too — so remember, you can always tweet at @ONECampaign with any questions you have about the event. See you on Friday!
Bob Geldof: G8 leaders still capable of ending poverty
This week Bob Geldof returned to Ethiopia to highlight various issues in the country including food security, in the run up to the G8 Summit due to take place at Camp David this weekend.
Bob Geldof has called on the leaders of the G8 to make good on their promises to tackle extreme poverty and hunger.
Over 290,000 ONE members have signed our Thrive petition calling on the G8 to support a global plan to ensure 50 million people escape poverty through agriculture and 15 million children no longer endure chronic malnutrition. Plus, this week thousands of ONE members have been sending messages to be written on the road leading to the summit by the ONE street tweet robot.
You can watch the full report from ITV here, or as featured on MSNBC below:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Honouring the commitment to put an end to food insecurity
This piece is part of a series of blogs by leading NGOs to call attention to a range of issues that should be raised at the G8 summit at Camp David in rural Maryland from May 18 to 19. This was originally published on Huffington Post Impact.
If you took the current population of the United States and quadrupled it, you would almost have the number of people living in extreme poverty in the world today. A whopping 20 percent of the world’s population — 1.4 billion people — lives on less than $1.25 a day. Over two-thirds of these extremely poor people do not have enough food to eat, and going to bed hungry is an everyday occurrence.
Dadaab.
Food security, hunger and poverty are some of the most overwhelming problems facing the world today. It is undeniable that the vicious cycle of hunger and poverty will not be easily broken, especially since it has been exacerbated in recent years due to external shocks like the global food and economic crisis. Countless parents are unable to feed their families enough nutritious food, leaving children hungry and malnourished. Over a billion people will go to sleep hungry tonight.
But don’t despair. Despite these hurdles, we can break this cycle for good, and the G8 must take the necessary steps to put an end to food insecurity once and for all. As the G8 countries prepare to convene at Camp David, agriculture in the developing world is expected to be a big focus. ONE and our 3 million members worldwide are jumping on this opportunity to ask the G8 leaders to remember their L’Aquila commitments and to invest in 30 country-owned plans that can ensure that 50 million people escape poverty through agriculture and 15 million children no longer suffer from chronic malnutrition.
At the 2009 L’Aquila G8 Summit, the G8 countries and five other donors responded to the global food crisis and pledged $22 billion in support of agriculture and food security initiatives. The donors promised to deliver the funds within three years, to agree on a set of principles as to how they would spend the money, and remain transparent and accountable on their commitment.
Despite the initial enthusiasm and diligence, however, the major donors failed to agree to consistent pledge years or a uniform system for measuring progress for the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative (AFSI). As of July 2011, donors had disbursed a mere 22 percent of their $22 billion pledges, and in most cases, donors had not taken the Rome Principles to heart. Only 7 of the 40+ L’Aquila Initiative signatories have made pledges to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, GAFSP, the multilateral fund that best embodies the Rome Principles.
Just as important as the dollars and cents of the donor’s pledges is how the donors promised to spend those funds, as significant budget constraints in many countries make maximizing the impact of every aid dollar absolutely essential.
The Rome Principles call on all donors to design development plans based on the needs of each developing country and to guarantee that all actors are cooperating to achieve sustainable outcomes. The Rome Principle of country ownership calls for investing in country-owned plans, aimed at channeling resources to well-designed and results-based programs and partnerships. Country ownership is of particular importance to us now, and the United States has started to take country ownership seriously as part of its Feed the Future initiative. Unfortunately, most other donors lag behind in developing investment plans that are country-led.
With this lapse in mind, ONE has launched Thrive — an ambitious new campaign that calls on each of us to play our part in tackling the root causes of hunger and extreme poverty. You can learn more about the campaign and find out how to get involved at www.one.org.
Our recent research has shown that if donors, national governments, and the private sector funded the country agriculture plans of the 30 poor countries that have taken the time to determine what their farmers need to thrive, we could lift 50 million people out of poverty with those 30 plans alone. If we complemented those agriculture plans with nutrition interventions in countries that have demonstrated commitment to nutrition, 15 million fewer young children will suffer from stunting or irreversible developmental damage to their minds, organs and bodies
As food prices rise yet again, the barriers to achieving food security and poverty reduction remain more daunting than ever. Supporting country-led initiatives is one of the most proven ways to achieve sustainable development and progress against food insecurity, and I encourage the G8 leaders to remember this as they head to Camp David later this month.
Read more G8 news and blogs on HuffPost’s G8 big news page.
Taking it to the street
One of the biggest creative challenges we face is finding ways to adequately express the spirit and strength of our amazing membership — And more than this, to maximize the impact of member voices to push for the positive changes we are all seeking to achieve. Combine this scenario with a message-saturated G8 Summit and you’ll understand why we’ve had to find something extraordinary to do next week… Ahem, cue Tweet the Street…
We have been hard at work with some tech wizards to create the ONE Street Tweeter – a clever robot that can print short tweets, tweetetes if you will, (40 characters or less) on road surfaces. Yes – we want to take your messages on the road. Better still, if we print your message we’ll even send a pic of it back to you to share it with your friends.
So, what are you waiting for? You guys are more creative than any of those Mad Men types. Just tweet a message in your own words (no more than 40 characters including spaces) to encourage, rouse, and hustle the G8 to act now on hunger and poverty.
Tweet your message to @ONEStreetTweet or if you don’t do that sort of thing then you can type your message into the box below.
Let’s hit the road and get heard.
The jury is still out, but all eyes are on the G8
This blog originally appeared on Business Fights Poverty an online community for business and development.
The Camp David G8 Summit is fast approaching. Organizations like ONEhave been working tirelessly to influence the G8’s thinking on food and nutrition security. We’ve asked the G8 to not only deliver on their past commitments, but more importantly, agree to do more.
At ONE, we’ve also asked our 3 million members worldwide to plant a seed of change in the heads of the G8. This “seed of change” calls on the G8 – along with African governments and the private sector – to fully finance 30 agriculture and food security country investment plans and proven nutrition solutions to lift 50 million people out of poverty and save 15 million children from stunting within the next 10 years. Our new Thrive campaign report “Food. Farming. Future.” spells out the details.
How are the G8 responding? Well, it’s a little tough to say. No formal proposals have been shared publicly, but this is what we’ve been hearing about the anticipated US G8 Proposal:
- The private sector is the missing link to agricultural-led growth and food security and the G8 will focus its efforts on leveraging private sector investment in Africa to lift 50 million people out of poverty over 10 years
- To start, the G8 will pilot a number of investments – from risk management to scaling technology and innovation in the farming sector – in 6 “vanguard” countries: Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania
- The G8 will continue to prioritize country-ownership and align investments behind country-investment plans and target smallholder farmers, especially women small-holder farmers
As you can imagine, this is not a lot of detail for a global initiative that is so critical for breaking the cycle of poverty and malnutrition. Naturally, it raises a lot of questions:
- Will the G8 offer up new financing to back this initiative? Surely it cannot succeed, nor these goals realized, without sustained donor support.
- 6 countries is hardly global, will they reach the level of ambition needed to lift 50 million people out of poverty? And what does this signal to the remaining 25 countries (Cote d’Ivoire doesn’t have an investment plan) about the efforts they’ve taken so far to become investment-ready?
- How will the G8 ensure that the private sector aligns behind country plans? Or agree to target smallholders and women as their customers and beneficiaries?
- Which private sector are they referring to? Will the initiative help to build small and medium sized enterprises in Africa – a necessary requirement for building sustainable agriculture sectors – in addition to looking for outside investment?
- Where is nutrition in all of this? The consequences of neglecting childhood nutrition are devastating and debilitating for families, communities and countries.
- And what lies ahead for accountability? The current annual G8 Accountability reports are lacklustre. Greater transparency and consistent and standard reporting requirements are a must.
With less than 3 weeks to go, the G8 must demonstrate how it will align its endeavors behind country owned plans – this is needed to achieve greater impact, and to boost confidence in African leaders and prospective African investors – from outside and within. Africa is ready to do business and has enormous untapped potential to be a greater contributor to the global economy, but donor aid is the cornerstone to reducing investment risk – especially for reaching disparate and poor producers – and cannot be downplayed or dismissed, even under challenging financial circumstances.
Emily Alpert is ONE’s senior agriculture policy manager.
Dear G8… join a massive twitter action to call for action on poverty
In four weeks time, the G8 leaders will meet Camp David in the United States to discuss a variety of issues, including agriculture in the developing world. We need to make our voices heard at this vital time – with your help we can put poverty issues on the table at this G8.
Starting on Thursday, 18th April to the 30th, ONE and a group of charities and NGOs are using Twitter to ask their members to tweet their leaders to tell them to keep poverty issues on the agenda at this G8. The issues range from hunger, disease, vaccines and economic growth. For the next 11 days, we need you to help push out these messages to your Twitter streams and get your friends and followers involved.
You can join this Twitter action in two easy steps:
1. Log in to Twitter and send these messages. Ask your friends and family to RT. (Click any of the links below to automatically tweet).
2. Watch your Twitter stream for tweets using either #G8 or #DearG8 in their tweets and then re-tweet them to your audiences. And don’t forget to check out their links and take their actions, too.
And don’t forget that you can use your other networks as well to support the #DearG8 tweets. Ask your Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts to use their Twitter accounts and join in as well. Tell them that there is a way to break out of the cycles of reducing poverty and child malnutrition. So get started with these steps and put your 140 characters on Twitter to good use. Together we can make a difference.
Vote for a better acronym, ASAP
Here in the fight against global poverty the acronyms often seem endless. There’s the LDCs and MDCs, HIPCs and LLDCs, which we like to talk about in terms of GDP, ODI and latterly HPI (or if you live in Bhutan GDH). We campaign for MDGs at the G7, G8, G20, UN and EU, and then there’s the WTO and IMF and in the UK DfID (who like to buck the trend with a lower-case ‘f’). Sometimes it’s helpful to have a dictionary to hand when you work for an NGO.
But, often hiding behind these confusing mouthfuls of letters are vital initiatives which can help to make a real difference to people in poor countries.
Today, we need your help fixing one of these mouthfuls. GAFSP. The Global Agriculture and Food Security Program. It has a powerful mission, but a pretty clunky name. In fact, most people have never heard of GAFSP, as you’ll see in this video:
GAFSP works by asking countries (like Ethiopia and Liberia) to devise their own agriculture plans – things like building irrigation canals, farmer training programs, whatever they think will work and is appropriate. Then, national governments and donors from around the world (US, Canada, Spain) provide funding to help put these plans into action.
We asked ONE members for suggestions for a new name and have narrowed it down to the entries below. Have a look and then vote for your favourite here. We’ll send the top three to G8 officials and hope that one of them gets picked.
PLANT
Powering Local Agriculture Needs TodaySAGE
Sustainable Agriculture for Global EnterpriseFood Security Initiative (FSI)
F3
Financing for Food and FarmingAgAid
Food for the Future
MIDAS
Multilateral Initiative for Development of Agricultural Sustainability – everything it touches turns to gold!
Vote for your favorite name on Facebook, and then we’ll deliver the top three to GAFSP on April 17.
The fight against famine continues
“Famine outcomes no longer exist in southern Somalia”. These eight words, at the start of a dry assessment released on Friday by the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit in Nairobi, can hardly be considered a cause for celebration. For the last four months, a part of the world had been struck by famine – not just food shortage, or even extreme hunger, but the appalling conditions that meet the strict technical definition of a famine. As ONE insisted, no f-word could be more obscene. Drought may be inevitable, but famine is not – and famine in the 21st century is an obscenity.
So it’s difficult to jump for joy at the news that this famine has come to an end – not least because millions of people in the Horn of Africa are still in desperate need. In Somalia especially, where new concerns about access for humanitarian organisations are emerging, the famine has left people more vulnerable than ever. Like a determined boxer who hauls himself to his feet after taking a beating, the next punch could be the most devastating of all.
And yet, the fact remains that while the world took too long to act on early warnings of crisis in 2011, it did act. Millions of people, from ordinary citizens to policymakers, stepped forward. The global African diaspora demanded action. 400,000 people signed ONE’s petition urging leaders to do more. Leading politicians responded in the European Commission, the African Union, the UK, Sweden and Kenya. Millions of people contributed to the UN’s most successful humanitarian appeal and record public appeals in Britain, Germany and countless other countries. Critically, aid workers from Africa and across the world delivered relief in the most challenging of conditions, and continue to do so right now. All these actions saved lives.
And now this belated but strong effort has been rewarded with a little good fortune. Somalia has enjoyed a better-than-expected harvest. That has pushed food prices down in local markets and there is, for now at least, room to breathe.
Now the obvious question: can we stop this happening again? If political promises made years ago had been kept in the first place, we could have avoided much of the terrible human cost of the last few months. They must be kept now – by African governments who promised to invest ten per cent of their money on agriculture, and by richer nations who made commitments at the G8. And of course it isn’t just about money. More progress was made at last year’s Cannes G20 summit to reduce the volatility in global food prices that has caused havoc in the poorest families’ budgets. That progress needs to be built on urgently.
Together, we managed to force action on this famine over the last few months. Let’s keep that pressure up. We need to build a movement that can keep food and agriculture at the top of the agenda. The US, who host this year’s G8 summit, have a big leadership role. The Horn of Africa’s wealthy neighbours in the Gulf are global players too, well able to do their part. And governments in Europe must keep their promises, starting with the British-led conference on Somalia later this month. Overcoming extreme hunger is not just a fight we must face. It’s one we can win.
One last chance to Hurl Berl
Since 2005 ONE has been monitoring promises made by the G8 countries to Africa. Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi is unique because he is the only leader to have consistently cut effective aid to Africa since he personally signed the G8 communiqué in 2005.
So last year we launched a campaign called Hurl Berl, which asked ONE members to literally throw Prime Minister Berlusconi out of the G8.
The game was intended to be light-hearted and satirical. But there is a serious message: when leaders make serious commitments they should follow up on them. ONE therefore welcomes Prime Minister Berlusconi’s decision to step aside and, we hope, be replaced by someone who will keep his or her promises to the world’s poorest.
Italy’s financial situation is serious, but as policy-makers are considering budget reforms, we are calling on members of the Italian Parliament not to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. As they look to replace Prime Minister Berlusconi, we are asking that they keep in mind that Italy should never again be associated with broken promises to the world’s poorest – their commitments should be associated with European leadership on aid.
In the meantime we ask you to Hurl Berl one last time and ask your friends to join you!
British PM speaks out on aid commitments
Following last week’s G8 conference British Prime Minister Cameron spoke out strongly on the $19 billion gap between what the Group promised at Gleneagles in 2005 and what they delivered in 2010. The summit, hosted by France, produced their own accountability report on how the member countries were doing against the aid targets they set themselves. As this year’s DATA report shows they have only delivered 61% of the promised increases. However, this masks a wide disparity of performance between countries with, for example, Italy completely breaking their word to the world’s poorest people. The UK, on the other hand, can proudly claim to be the first G8 county to have budgeted to reach the 0.7% of Gross National Income target for overseas development assistance set by the United Nations over 40 years ago.
Cameron highlighted this in a passionate defence of why Britain has committed to keep its promises, even in tough economic times:
“I remember as a young politician watching the Gleneagles Summit and that Live 8 concert and thinking it was right that world leaders should have made those pledges so publically. And I think when you make a promise like that to the poorest people in the world you should keep it. And I’m proud of the fact that Britain is doing just that. But the reality is that as a whole, the G8 has not. The communiqué is actually very clear on this: Britain ensured that the accountability report published at this Summit shows clearly what each country has done and what they have not done to meet their aid commitments. That means numbers in real terms allowing for inflation not just in cash terms; and it means highlighting – and we’ve done this in the communiqué – not hiding, highlighting the $19 billion – the $19 billion gap between what’s been expected and that’s been delivered. Britain will not balance its books on the backs of the poorest. We’ll be the first G8 country to his the 0.7% target by 2013. Britain will keep its promises and I was tough in urging my counterparts to keep theirs.”
ONE welcomes his reiterating of the Gleneagles promises and Britain’s support in ensuring the G8 couldn’t pull off a shoddy accountancy trick in publishing figures which ignored inflation. Similarly Cameron was correct to highlight the vital pledging conference of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations later this month. ONE is looking for all donors to step up and help plug a funding deficit to save 4 million children’s lives by 2015.
Cameron also highlighted the broader role that aid has in any country’s 21st century foreign policy:
“If you’re not convinced that it’s right to vaccinate children against diarrhoea, to try and stop the preventable diseases, to try and save mothers in childbirth; if that doesn’t do it for you, what about this argument? That these countries that are broken like Somalia, like Afghanistan – if we don’t invest in them before they get broken we end up with the problems; we end up paying the price of the terrorism, of the crime, of the mass migration, of the environmental devastation. You know, if we’d put a fraction of what we’re spending now in Afghanistan on military equipment into that country as aid and development when it had a chance perhaps of finding its own future, wouldn’t that have been a better decision.”
He ended with a promise to continue making the case for smartly spent aid and deserves to be congratulated for his fine words in Deauville.
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About the Blog
The International ONE Blog is a daily log of the anti-poverty movement. The site is operated by ONE staff, with guest contributions from ONE volunteers, members and allies.
The content of each post and each comment represents the views of that author and does not necessarily reflect the views of ONE. ONE does not support or oppose any candidate for elected office, and any post expressing support or opposition for a candidate is not endorsed by ONE.
TAGS: Agriculture, Barack Obama, Bono, G8, Thrive