Remarks by USAID Administrator Shah at Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security

Last year, the number of people that – suffering from chronic hunger topped 1 billion, increasing for the first time in decades, but it has been consistently increasing for the last few years.

The food crisis, the global financial crisis, have all contributed to this rise in chronic hunger. But let’s be honest: so did years of drift and lack of attention from the global community and from the donor community, including the United States of America.

The Chicago Council report, which has served as very much a road map for this effort, asks the U.S. to lead a second Green Revolution. And we completely agree. The first Green Revolution, a term coined by a USAID administrator, William Gaud, succeeded in lifting incomes and lessening hunger in large parts of the world.

In 1979, agricultural programs made up 18 percent of all foreign assistance. By 2007, that number was 3.5 percent. In the early ’80s, agricultural productivity growth in developing countries topped 3 percent per year. By a few years ago, that number was below 1 percent, and not enough to keep up with the rate of population growth in precisely the places that were most affected.

The human effects of this neglect are clear. Increasing hunger, chronically undernourished children who are unable to learn and who suffer from a lifetime of lost opportunity because of what happens to their nutritional status in the first two years of their life.

But these effects also threaten our own global stability. We’ve seen time after time, examples of food riots, instability and conflict as communities fight over scarce productive resources.

I came most recently from Darfur, arriving back last night. And every single person I spoke to, of the hundreds of thousands that were in the IDP camps I visited, had agricultural backgrounds and sought again an agricultural future, but their access to viable, productive resources has been limited severely by the conflict.

So we know agricultural development is a springboard for broader economic development and we know food security is the foundation for peace and opportunity, and therefore, our own national security.

This administration’s plan and this president’s plan for a more peaceful world center on enhancing prosperity in our partner countries by elevating development and better integrating it with diplomacy and defense as part of our foreign policy.

That is why President Obama pledged in his inaugural address that we would work alongside the people of lower-income countries to make their farms flourish.

And that is why Secretary Clinton together with Sec.-Gen. Ban Ki-Moon last September drew together leaders from more than 130 countries around the world for a special session at the U.N. General Assembly, asking each of them to make commitments to this global cause. And that’s why we’re here today.