Secretary Clinton’s Remarks at the WorldFood Program USA Awards Ceremony
Read a blog post by a Tanzanian agronomist who spoke at the event
The following is an excerpt from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s remarks at the World Food Program USA’s 2012 McGovern Leadership Award ceremony. Read or watch the Secretary’s full remarks on the State Department website.
Before we hear from David and Christina, I want to take just a moment to look at how far we have come since starting this journey together four years ago. We had studied the historic trends and saw that while the Green Revolution had lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, it had largely bypassed many others, especially in Africa. At the same time, if you remember back to the global economic crisis of 2008, one of the impacts was skyrocketing food prices combined with climate problems that really conspired to put so many people into hunger and malnutrition. There were, for the first time in history, more than one billion hungry people in the world.
And so the Obama Administration and partners around the world looked at how both the trend lines and the headlines were talking to us, and said: Look, we can’t wait; we have to act now. And we called on G-8 donor partners, and at the G-8 Summit in L’Aquila, they came up with the Food Security Initiative, which was an unprecedented $22 billion commitment. And the United States did our part with President Obama’s announcement of a $3.5 billion pledge, which led to our Feed the Future program.
As you saw on the video, our efforts are starting to pay off. Feed the Future has helped 9 million children get the nutrition they need to thrive, especially in those first 1,000 days from pregnancy through a child’s second birthday. We’re working with the private sector to help farmers connect with markets where they get better prices for their products. Nearly 2 million more farmers are producing the high-quality, sustainably grown products—like rice, coffee, and cacao—that businesses and customers are demanding. Now, we have an ambitious research agenda, collaborating with the private sector, on the next generation of tools that will accelerate our progress. And we will soon launch an action plan to deepen our work with civil society groups.