MALNUTRITION: Tanzania: More U.S. Support to Combat Hunger and Malnutrition

Stephen Kaufman

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jun 13, 2011 — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the Obama administration is increasing funding for Tanzanian nutritional programs as part of its Feed the Future initiative and pledged the administration's commitment to Tanzania's agricultural sector.
Clinton visited the Mlandizi Farm Women's Cooperative in Dar es Salaam June 12, 2011. The cooperative is supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development and is training women to grow and sell food.
Through Feed the Future, the United States is working with Tanzania's agriculture and food security investment plan to "address the root causes of poverty, hunger, and under-nutrition," she said.
The Obama administration is asking the U.S. Congress to approve a nearly $70 million investment to support Tanzania's plan, and is increasing its nutritional funding to $6.7 million.
According to a March 3 State Department fact sheet, President Obama launched Feed the Future in response to the 20077â?2008 spike in global food prices with a $3.5 billion pledge to help poorer countries fight hunger through agricultural development.
"The U.S. Government's Feed the Future Initiative utilizes innovation, research, and development to improve agricultural productivity, link farmers to local and regional markets, enhance nutrition, and build safety nets. These investments will increase the supply of food where it is needed and help vulnerable people withstand price shocks better," the fact sheet said.
Clinton said three out of every four Tanzanians work in agriculture and account for 25 percent of the country's economy. But they face difficult obstacles.
"They don't have good roads in rural areas, so it is difficult to get their products to market. Low crop productivity can also be a challenge. And while the country is largely self-sufficient in maize, the main staple crop, many farmers don't have the tools they need to use their land as efficiently as their counterparts in other countries around the world," she said.
Clinton said three out of every four Tanzanians work in agriculture and account for 25 percent of the country's economy. But they face difficult obstacles.

"They don't have good roads in rural areas, so it is difficult to get their products to market. Low crop productivity can also be a challenge. And while the country is largely self-sufficient in maize, the main staple crop, many farmers don't have the tools they need to use their land as efficiently as their counterparts in other countries around the world," she said.
In addition, regional and seasonal crop imbalances have meant that four out of 10 young children do not get enough calories or the nutrients they need to grow up healthy, she said.
"I believe for every challenge in Tanzania, there is a solution in Tanzania," she said, and the United States wants to help.
"We have decided to concentrate our resources here in line with the country-led vision laid out by the government of Tanzania. We are working with the private sector, the World Bank, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and others. And we want to focus on results for people," she said
http://www.africom.mil/getArticle.asp?art=6767

MALNUTRITION: AFRICA: Bullish about the agricultural future

LONDON, 23 July 2010 (IRIN) - Suddenly, after 20 years of relative neglect, African agriculture is a hot topic, with a substantial growth in production and a new interest among major donors in funding the sector. That is the message emerging from a series of seminars now taking place in London looking at the constraints and opportunities facing Africa's farmers.The figures being presented are impressive and - according to Steve Wiggins, who leads the agriculture programme at Britain's Overseas Development Institute - confound the pessimists who assume the situation to be much worse than it is."I often hear it said that Africa is running out of food per head," he told the seminar. "Now unless these statistics are complete and utter junk, that just simply isn't true. The index shows 16, 17, 18 percent more food being produced per capita compared to the early 1980s."In particular, he said, two regions - West Africa and North Africa - were surging ahead, although there were signs that production in East Africa too might now be beginning to accelerate."For those of us working on Africa," said Wiggins, "people use Asia as a stick to beat us with. Well, as far as I can see, there are two bits of Africa there which have done every bit as well as Asia has done over the last quarter of a century."Wiggins's fellow speaker at the opening session was Ousman Badiane, the Africa director of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington. He put his finger on the mid nineties as the point when Africa really turned a corner.With no other overall change which could account for this recovery, Badiane attributed it to the structural adjustment programmes which so many countries had been persuaded to follow. "I believe it was the result of those strong and messy reform programmes of the 1980s. I remember the pain of it, but it completely changed the environment for agriculture."Challenges, opportunitiesBoth speakers were agreed that the food price spike in 2008 and the world economic crisis pose both challenges and opportunities for African farmers. They worried about a growing protectionism in Asia - a major potential market for African agricultural produce - and about the fact that the speed of Asian development may have closed a window of opportunity for African's own industrialization. Steve Wiggens made the point that "the single biggest stimulus to most farmers is a thriving local city."Above all they worried that the gains of the last 20 years might be reversed. Ousman Badiane referred to a new law passed in Kenya to restore price controls on agricultural produce. "That's where Kenya was 25 years ago," he said. "The danger is that the generation of leaders that went through the pains of those reforms are no longer active. So those leaders today can make the same mistakes as the leaders of 25 years ago."And he added: "It is just for me unimaginable that a farmer stands up every day, produces the food and someone claims that is a common good - "It's OUR rice, it's OUR maize." It's amazing. Nobody goes to the farm with them, but once they produce the product, everybody claims it as their own. That has to change. It's a private product; it belongs to the farmers. And they have to be able to sell it for the price that the market offers."CAADEPOusmane Badiane sees the African Union's CAADEP (Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme) project, in so far as it gives a voice to farmers, as an influence against this kind of reversal of policies. The first two seminars both sparked discussion of CAADEP, which obliges member governments to devote 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture and encourages them to produce a coherent plan to which donors can subscribe.But there was a considerable level of scepticism about CAADEP. One participant, currently working in Malawi, described the frantic rush to produce a programme to put before donors, and said he had seen no evidence of new money becoming available.This was echoed by Christie Peacock, chief executive officer of the NGO Farm Africa. "There's so little vision," she said. "I'm very sceptical about the CAADEP process. It's supposed to be African led, but it's often a very top-down process."She echoed the reservations expressed by several participants, that even if new money was now being offered for agricultural development, both through CAADEP and from the US government's Feed the Future programme, there was no well-thought-out plan about how it should be used. "I think we are visionless at the moment," Peacock said, "and after 20 years of lack of interest, we are in danger of reinventing the wheel all over again."But the keynote speaker at the second seminar, Professor Sir Gordon Conway, author of The Doubly Green Revolution, was more optimistic about funding: "I do think there will be money - about a billion dollars of USAID [US Agency for International Development] money this year, and a billion plus next. Not perhaps the 3.5 billion that has been talked about, but around 2.7 billion will be there.""Twenty years ago there was a view that African didn't need agricultural development, that the private sector would do it all, and among some donor agencies that view is still there. But as a result of the food price crisis we have things like the Feed the Future programme, which looks for countries' own plans. It recognizes that countries are different, asks what they intend to do, and acts accordingly, and I think that's quite a good approach."The African Seminar Series is organized by the Future Agricultures Consortium and the Overseas Development Institute. Further sessions on markets, land issues and agriculture-led development in an urbanizing world will take place between now and the beginning of September.

POVERTY: Criticism of "Feed the Future Initiative"

The Obama Administration just released its feed the future initiative, promising $3.5 billion in agricultural funding for development. Those looking for a host of impressive buzzwords will be starry-eyed with countless calls for transparency, stake-holder consultation and some strange variety of “country ownership”.
Nonethelss, those who were hoping for a new line towards food security in the global south will be sorely disappointed. For all of its talk on country ownership, FTF relies heavily on the old “good governance” rhetoric, singling out recipients who meet the macroeconomic demands of Bretton Woods. For instance, one of the benchmarks for who gets the aid is the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) process, which outlines national poverty reduction policies, but requires full approval from the IMF. So national ownership kind of goes out the window.
FTF contains a small blurb about increasing the agricultural capacity of women farmers, but any sort of substantial plan on this front remains lacking at best. The most we could gleam was a promise to “integrate gender concerns” into the processes. Sadly, the talk here still is on creating larger bureaucracies to ensure compliance with Bretton Woods conditionality rather than promote any sort of direct investment in agriculture or women-producers.
http://themicroloanfoundation.wordpress.com/author/themicroloanfoundation/

MALNUTRITION: Feed The Future Initiative

At the G8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy in July 2009, global leaders committed to "act with the scale and urgency needed to achieve sustainable global food security." They recognized that the combined effect of longstanding underinvestment in agriculture and food security, historically high and volatile food prices, and the economic and financial crisis was increasing dramatically the number of poor and hungry and jeopardizing global progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). By robbing people of a healthy and productive life and stunting the development of the next generation, hunger leads to devastating consequences for individuals, families, communities, and nations. At L’Aquila, leaders called for increased investment in agriculture and rural development as a proven lever for combating food insecurity and as an engine for broader economic growth, prosperity, and stability.
Feed the Future (FTF), the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative, renews our commitment to invest in sustainably reducing hunger and poverty. At L’Aquila, President Obama’s pledge of at least $3.5 billion for agricultural development and food security over three years helped to leverage and align more than $18.5 billion from other donors in support of a common approach. The 2009 G8 and G20 Summits established a framework for coordinated and comprehensive action among host governments, donors, civil society, the private sector, and other stakeholders. The five principles of a common approach, first articulated at L’Aquila, embrace the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action, and were endorsed unanimously as the Rome Principles for Sustainable Food Security by 193 countries at the 2009 World Summit on Food Security.
We are guided by the Rome Principles as we work alongside development partners to support processes through which countries develop and implement food security strategies and investment plans that reflect their needs, priorities, and development strategies. The country-owned plans, referred to in this document as Country Investment Plans (CIPs), serve as the foundation for countries to mobilize resources and coordinate with development partners to accelerate their progress toward the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger and poverty by 2015. As described in the Rome Principles, we commit to work in partnership to:
http://www.feedthefuture.gov/FTF_Guide.pdf