The 2012 G-8 summit of the eight largest industrialized
countries, to be held in May at Camp David in the United
States, is an opportunity to bolster commitment to help resolve the crisis of global food insecurity and food price volatility. Approximately 925 million of the world’s people suffer
from chronic malnutrition and hunger; more than half of
these people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture
for their livelihoods.1
Significant, sudden increases in the prices of staple foods
in 2007 and the first half of 2008 forced more than 100 million people into hunger. While prices fell in 2008 and 2009,
they stayed above the historically low levels seen earlier in
the decade and then rose sharply again in 2010-11. In February 2011, the World Bank announced that since June 2010,
rising food prices—reaching nearly their 2008 highs—had
driven an estimated additional 44 million people in developing countries into poverty.2 Volatility in the prices of food
commodities is expected to continue.
The consequences of food price shocks among hundreds
of millions of people already on edge have already been seen
in the riots that spread across 40 countries in 2008. The recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East were
sparked not only by pent-up political discontent, but also by
the anger and frustration of vulnerable people as global food
prices soared.3 The close relationship between volatile food
markets and political instability is indisputable.
The urgency of the global food security crisis was
recognized by the G-8 summit in 2009 in L’Aquila. Thirteen
developed countries joined in the L’Aquila Food Security
Initiative (AFSI), which committed participating nations
to take all necessary measures to achieve global food
security, including mobilizing $22 billion over three years
for sustainable agricultural development.4 The initiative
2 Briefing Paper, May 2012
Figure 1: Official Development Assistance (ODA) to
Agriculture for Sub-Saharan Africa
— Overall assistance
— Multilateral assistance
— Bilateral assistance
4,500
Constant 2006 dollars (in millions)
USAID
2012’s Golden Opportunity
has begun to reverse decades of neglect of
agricultural development in low-income
countries; it has also stimulated new efforts—such
as co-financing, human capital development,
institutional capacity building, and marketplace
strengthening—to improve food security.
Complicating efforts to find longer-term solut