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Laura Elizabeth Pohl for Bread for the World
PFDA
Jane Sebbi of Uganda went from subsistence farming to selling her
surplus beans in the market. Through help from a project funded by Feed
the Future, this mother of seven hopes to earn enough money to send
her children to university.
of the federal budget, along with increased aid from industrialized nations, has supported rapid economic progress in
poor countries.
Despite huge budget pressures, we have managed to protect foreign assistance programs that help poor people.
There was a tragic surge in hunger in 2008, driven by the
global financial crisis and soaring prices for rice, wheat, and
corn. The incoming Obama administration responded, leading the world in increasing investment in agriculture and
nutrition in the most-affected countries. Bread for the World
and our members rallied around this initiative, called Feed
the Future.
In 2011, more than 4.3 million farmers around the world
benefitted from U.S. agricultural development assistance
through projects like Feed the Future.
In 2008, major research findings gave the world new
knowledge about how to tackle the scourge of child malnutrition. One conclusion was that nutrition assistance should
target the 1,000 days from the start of a woman’s pregnancy
through her child’s second birthday. Bread for the World Institute played a leadership role in urging U.S. and international officials to incorporate this new knowledge into the global
food security program. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
launched the 1,000 Days initiative, and Bread for the World
organized a network of U.S. women across Christian denominations—Women of Faith for the 1,000 Days Movement—to
support this effort.
Bread for the World Institute convened international
2 Bread | November-December 2013
meetings on nutrition during Bread’s 2011 and 2013 National
Gatherings. At this year’s meeting, Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told Bread advocates, “You form one of the greatest
movements alive today—the fight to make hunger, malnutrition, and extreme poverty permanently a thing of the past.”
This year, world leaders committed $4.15 billion over
three years to scale up direct nutrition interventions and an
additional $19 billion for nutrition-sensitive programs in agriculture and other sectors. Shah is leading a review of nutrition-related programs in the U.S. government in order to use
available dollars most effectively.
The number of hungry people in the world has dropped
below the pre-2008 level and is continuing to decline—partly
because of U.S. leadership in promoting agriculture and nutrition among the poorest countries of the world.
When President Bush decided to increase assistance to
poor countries, he set up new institutions within the U.S.
government—the Millennium Challenge Corporation and
the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Bread for the World helped secure congressional support,
and both of these institutions have been effective.
Still, the entire U.S. foreign assistance system was badly in
need of reform. In response to this, Bread helped set up the
Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), a foreign
assistance reform coalition that has been supported by both
the Hewlett and Gates foundations.
In 2009, Bread for the World’s Offering of Letters campaign was a push for foreign assistance reform. When the