Secretary Clinton’s Remarks on Global Food Security

Now it wasn’t long ago that a symposium on food security would have drawn a very different crowd, because for years, passionate and persistent advocates made the case that this issue needed to be on the development agenda of every nation. Well, the United States listened, the G-8 countries listened, and now it’s a signature issue.

Billions of dollars have been pledged by the world’s largest economies, and those pledges are being met. The G-20 has embraced this mission. So has the World Bank and the African Union. And 30 African nations are creating national agricultural investment plans and revising their budgets to make agriculture a leading priority.

Now in the United States, we’ve created our own global food security initiative, and as you were able to hear directly from President Obama earlier today, Feed the Future is at the forefront of our global development agenda. Now we took on food security right out of the box in this Administration because the facts were so compelling.

Yes, it’s a complex, far-reaching issue, but it comes down to a couple of very key facts – nearly a billion people worldwide suffering from chronic hunger; by the year 2050, the global population will climb to 9 billion, and the world will need to produce 70 percent more food than we do today just to feed everyone; 75 percent of the world’s poor live in rural settings and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.