On April 26, the Council launched a new report, Growing Food for Growing Cities: Transforming Food Systems in an Urbanizing World, at the Global Food Security Symposium 2016. Each week, we will highlight one of the report’s recommendations on the Global Food for Thought blog. Watch for a new post each Wednesday, and join the discussion using #GlobalAg.
U.S. leadership will be essential to meet the challenge of feeding an increasingly urban world. While growing cities—especially those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—put new pressures on the global food system, the world must also increase agricultural production to feed 9 billion people by 2050, build resilience to a changing climate, and meet the growing demand for diverse, nutritious food. Since World War II the United States has led global efforts to mitigate hunger and malnutrition. Today, U.S. policymakers must continue this legacy.
To improve the world’s food systems and meet exploding demand, the United States must enable and leverage private-sector investments. U.S. expertise is imperative to ensure that small-scale farmers and rural SMEs can fully participate in and benefit from burgeoning urban markets. Investments in scientific research and innovation will also be needed for food systems to successfully meet demand.
Meeting these challenges is in the interest of the United States. Growing markets create demand for U.S. exports and offer enormous new investment opportunities for the private sector. Strong global food systems will contribute to affordable, nutritious, and safe food for consumers around the globe, including in the United States. Stable food supplies and food prices are also critical to political and economic stability and are therefore soundly in the U.S. national security interest. Indeed, other nations such as China are already seeking to ensure their future food security and trading relationships by accelerating the pace and scale of their investments in food systems.
The U.S. government can undertake a number of policy actions in collaboration with researchers, policymakers, civil society, practitioners, and the private sector to invest in food systems that can feed the world’s cities, support the livelihoods of small-scale farmers and rural residents, and reduce hunger and poverty.
Leadership from both the current and the next presidential administration can drive agencies to implement many of the recommendations in this report. Many U.S. government agencies have a great deal of expertise on food security, agricultural development, and food systems. This expertise will be more critical than ever to addressing increasingly complex food system challenges.
Leadership from Congress is also imperative to support implementation, coordination, and appropriations for many of the recommendations. Numerous members of Congress from both parties and both houses have championed global food security issues. Continued bipartisan leadership from members of Congress is essential to ensuring that the United States continues to lead global efforts to advance global food security.
To facilitate this leadership, the report calls for:
- Congress to pass authorizing legislation that commits the United States to a long-term global food and nutrition security strategy.
- Agencies to increase support for strengthening low-income countries’ policymaking. Priority areas should include infrastructure development, land tenure, gender and nutrition sensitive agricultural policy, and food safety.
- The administration to lead G7 and G20 global food security discussions and reinvigorate global commitments to food security and agricultural development using the Sustainable Development Goals as a common framework.
- Agencies to support the development of early warning systems in low-income countries to monitor threats to food systems such as food contamination, crop pest and disease outbreaks, livestock disease, and zoonotic threats.
- Congress to pass legislation authorizing the Millennium Challenge Corporation to make regional compacts in order to build regional food systems.