Bread November-December 2013 | Page 2

from page 1 Laura Elizabeth Pohl for Bread for the World PFDA Jane Sebbi of Uganda went from subsistence farming to selling her surplus beans in the market. Through help from a project funded by Feed the Future, this mother of seven hopes to earn enough money to send her children to university. of the federal budget, along with increased aid from industrialized nations, has supported rapid economic progress in poor countries. Despite huge budget pressures, we have managed to protect foreign assistance programs that help poor people. There was a tragic surge in hunger in 2008, driven by the global financial crisis and soaring prices for rice, wheat, and corn. The incoming Obama administration responded, leading the world in increasing investment in agriculture and nutrition in the most-affected countries. Bread for the World and our members rallied around this initiative, called Feed the Future. In 2011, more than 4.3 million farmers around the world benefitted from U.S. agricultural development assistance through projects like Feed the Future. In 2008, major research findings gave the world new knowledge about how to tackle the scourge of child malnutrition. One conclusion was that nutrition assistance should target the 1,000 days from the start of a woman’s pregnancy through her child’s second birthday. Bread for the World Institute played a leadership role in urging U.S. and international officials to incorporate this new knowledge into the global food security program. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched the 1,000 Days initiative, and Bread for the World organized a network of U.S. women across Christian denominations—Women of Faith for the 1,000 Days Movement—to support this effort. Bread for the World Institute convened international 2 Bread | November-December 2013 meetings on nutrition during Bread’s 2011 and 2013 National Gatherings. At this year’s meeting, Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told Bread advocates, “You form one of the greatest movements alive today—the fight to make hunger, malnutrition, and extreme poverty permanently a thing of the past.” This year, world leaders committed $4.15 billion over three years to scale up direct nutrition interventions and an additional $19 billion for nutrition-sensitive programs in agriculture and other sectors. Shah is leading a review of nutrition-related programs in the U.S. government in order to use available dollars most effectively. The number of hungry people in the world has dropped below the pre-2008 level and is continuing to decline—partly because of U.S. leadership in promoting agriculture and nutrition among the poorest countries of the world. When President Bush decided to increase assistance to poor countries, he set up new institutions within the U.S. government—the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Bread for the World helped secure congressional support, and both of these institutions have been effective. Still, the entire U.S. foreign assistance system was badly in need of reform. In response to this, Bread helped set up the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), a foreign assistance reform coalition that has been supported by both the Hewlett and Gates foundations. In 2009, Bread for the World’s Offering of Letters campaign was a push for foreign assistance reform. When the