More than 700 million people who survive on less than $1 per day live in rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. In September 2008, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs announced a Global Agricultural Development project and convened a bipartisan group of foreign policy and development leaders to build support for a renewed U.S. commitment to alleviating global poverty through agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The group’s report, Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty: The Chicago Initiative on Global Agricultural Development, was released on February 25, 2009, in Washington, D.C. at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The report includes five recommendations and more than twenty specific action items for how the United States, through increased agricultural development assistance and partnerships at home and abroad, could help more than 270 million people lift themselves out of poverty by 2020 and restore the United States as a force for positive change in the world.

Dan Glickman, former U.S. secretary of agriculture, and Catherine Bertini, former executive director of the UN World Food Program, served as cochairs of the bipartisan group consisting of thirteen former executive branch, congressional, international organization, and civic leaders in the fields of U.S. foreign policy, trade, international economics, and agricultural development and international organizations.

This project was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Learn more:
Global Agricultural Development Project Web site
Final Report
Project Announcement Press Release 
Final Report Press Release