Africa: White House On Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa

 

Fact Sheet: Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa
Since coming into office in 2009, President Obama has made global food security a foreign policy priority. At last year's Camp David G-8 Summit, President Obama joined with other G-8 leaders, African heads of state, the African Union and private sector leaders in launching the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, with an ambitious pledge to lift 50 million people out of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa by 2022.
Over the last year, the President also welcomed the commitment of the American people to food security and improved nutrition -- U.S. based non-governmental organizations themselves pledged more than $1 billion over three years in private funding for food security activities globally, and $750 million over five years for nutrition programs, including those aimed at supporting children in the critical 1,000 days from a woman's pregnancy to her child's second birthday.
New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition

The New Alliance combines policy reforms, targeted assistance and private sector investments to fuel the growth of Africa's agriculture economies, link smallholder farmers to markets, increase incomes and improve nutrition. During its first year, private sector companies - small and large, from Africa and around the world - signed letters of intent to invest more than $3.7 billion in New Alliance countries, and the number of countries participating tripled as founding New Alliance partners Ethiopia, Ghana and Tanzania welcomed first Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire and Mozambique and then Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria. Each of these countries has negotiated rigorous Country Cooperation Frameworks for accelerating investment that set forth policy reforms, private investment intentions, and donor commitments to align predictable assistance flows behind recipient country priorities. Senegal is slated to join the New Alliance in the fall of 2013.
Country Progress: New Alliance countries have already made significant progress. Ghana Nuts, once a recipient of U.S. Government development assistance, is now a leading agro processor and signed a letter of intent under the New Alliance to promote soya and expand maize procurement and processing in Ghana.

The Government of Tanzania's decision this year to end a longstanding export ban on maize, rice and other crops will help rural farmers collect fair prices for their harvests. In Ethiopia, DuPont has opened a state-of-the-art seed processing plant and warehouse that will help 35,000 smallholder maize farmers increase their yields by as much as 50 percent. And just eight months after officially joining the New Alliance in September 2012, Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso have also begun implementing key policy reforms to improve efficiency and transparency and boost the incomes of smallholders employed throughout the agriculture sector.