Number 4, August 2012
Development Works
Bread for the World Institute provides
policy analysis on hunger and strategies
to end it. The Institute educates opinion
leaders, policy makers and the public
about hunger in the United States and
abroad.
Snapshot
• Strengthening global partnerships
for development can help the
United States make a deeper
impact on hunger and extreme
poverty around the world. These
issues require collective action;
no one country has enough power
or resources to solve the problem.
Richard Lord
• Multilateral cooperation enables
the global community to pool
resources, share knowledge
of what is working well, and
identify and fill funding gaps in
the most promising programs.
In international development, the
whole is greater than the sum of
its parts.
U.S. development partnerships complement the efforts of people working toward a better
life, such as this Nepali woman on one of her daily trips to bring home clean water.
Leadership and Teamwork:
The U.S. Role in Development
The United States has spent much of its 250 years of independence as a leading
industrial nation, and for the past several decades, it has enjoyed “superpower”
status. Today, most Americans see the country as a global leader—it’s part of our
national identity. Opinions vary, though, as to what this type of leadership means
in practice—how it should affect the nation’s actions.
What does leadership mean in the field of international development? Creating, strengthening, and sustaining global partnerships for development can help
the United States make a wider, deeper, and more long-term impact on a problem most Americans care about: global hunger and extreme poverty.
1
• U.S. leadership is essential to
global action on food security—
it persuades others to act. A
2009 U.S. proposal to invest
significantly more resources in
agriculture won support from
donors in the “Group of 8”
(G-8) developed nations, who
committed to providing $22
billion to improve agricultural
productivity over three years.
In contrast, when the United
States reduced its support for
agricultural development in the
late 1980s, the efforts of most
other developed countries waned
as well.