Administrator Samantha Power at a Feed the Future Accelerator Event

ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Good morning, everyone. It's great to see such a full house and such energy in the house.

I want to thank Jake [Sullivan], to start, for being such a tremendous partner and really a visionary and someone who just understands in his very core, the core argument that Senator Boozman made, which is food security is national security.

The National Security Advisor's time is precious. There's a few things going on in the world right now - you might have noticed. Jake is here, and Jake was here yesterday as well for the launch of the Global Development Strategy. We're just so grateful to Jake for driving this agenda and the President's global infrastructure initiative and that game changing effort, which will bear fruit not only, you know, this year, next year, but decades into the future. It's going to have some of the most profound effects on food security on the continent, I think, that we have ever seen. So, thank you as well for shepherding that and bringing it to where we have taken it so far.

And, of course, we can use support up here on Capitol Hill for those efforts and those investments in infrastructure. And so, it's great to see such a bipartisan delegation here. Senator Boozman, Senator Coons, thank you for making time.

I will say that any time you can get John Boozman, Jake Sullivan, David Beasley, Chris Coons, Tracey Mann, Gregory Meeks, leading lights from the private sector, who will come to, leading lights from academia, some of the sharpest minds on food security, on national security, on Capitol Hill together at a busy time in one room, you know that at least one of two things is going on: either Liz Schrayer is involved, or we are talking about a very, very big deal. And in this case, it's both!

Liz, thank you so much for your leadership in strengthening and always seeking to expand the bipartisanship behind America's good work around the world. And, just intuiting and convincing so many about the inextricable links, again, between our security and the kinds of investments that we are making.

Senator Coons, specifically, as our appropriator-in-chief, just thank you for immersing yourself in the programs. And, I watch you on C-SPAN. I watch too much C-SPAN. And, I watch him cornering his colleagues and nerding out and hoping that they are as interested as he is in the fine details. But, we really are just so lucky to have you as a champion and somebody who is so immersed in this. And, Senator Bozeman, thank you for being here and changing your plans to be here and to show how much you value both, I think, Africa and food security. You're an amazing partner.

Special thanks to Ambassador [Hilda] Suka-Mafudze, who's here, Ambassador [Elsie Sia] Kanza, Deputy Chief of Mission [Martin] Banda, and Economic Counselor [Mumbi] Mulenga for your partnership and for joining us today.

Recently, and this will come as no surprise to anybody who happens to know about my borderline obsessive love of baseball, I found myself thinking about Moneyball, the book and later the movie, that you might remember about the 2002 Oakland A's baseball team.

After a few middling seasons, you remember, the team develops a brilliant new strategy, rigorously analyzing player performance data that everybody else has been ignoring to determine how they can use the resources that they have to build a roster that will deliver outsized returns. And in the end, this team that everybody had written off wins their division and actually just transforms, to this day, the way professional baseball teams do their business and approach building their rosters.

That is, I know it's a stretched analogy, perhaps for some, but as you hear more, you'll understand why the analogy actually works, this is exactly the type of success story we are hoping to write with Feed the Future. We know that when we make small, targeted investments, we can transform entire food systems.

We, you really, have done this before in places like Brazil, which was struggling to feed its rapidly growing population back in the 1970s, when it worked with USAID to launch a massive effort to boost agricultural productivity. Today, thanks to the hard work of Brazilians and the vision there, Brazil not only has a secure food supply for its own people, but is in fact the world's third largest food exporter, helping to feed hungry people in other places.

But, we have limited resources at our disposal to spur similar transformations. Feed the Future has been incredibly successful helping to cut poverty by an average of 20 to 25 percent in its areas of focus, just in this first decade that we are just concluding. But, Feed the Future's base budget has not changed since it was launched back in 2010. And, when you think again about prices generally, you'll see what that means for work being done out in the world.

And last year, notwithstanding the efforts of Senator Coons and others, Feed the Future was actually cut by more than four percent despite what Jake described, of course, the growing global needs, the shocks caused by the pandemic, Putin's invasion, the changing climate, among other factors.

Every day there's a new shock. So much that we were shocked. It seems like we need a new word, right? Because how does it shock, shocking, shocking, shocking.

Congress has leapt into action in response to these specific new crises, very specifically, of course, on Ukraine, but also Congress, recognizing the ripple effects, the cascading effects, from Putin's invasion on Africa and on food security more broadly. So, the approval of this really generous supplemental package with such strong bipartisan support has been absolutely key.

But, we can't rely on emergency supplemental funding for our long term plans to tackle global hunger. That is why we need a Moneyball strategy for Feed the Future to strategically deploy the resources that we have to spur the transformation that we know is needed.

And, that is exactly what the Feed the Future Accelerator is going to do.

We have run the numbers, and we are placing bets on three countries that have both high need and extraordinary potential to increase agricultural productivity. Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia are ripe for the kind of agricultural transformations we saw in countries like Brazil and India and South Korea. Efforts that lift millions out of poverty and can help stabilize the food supply for entire regions.

One reason why this is the case is that the type of farming system that is prevalent in these countries, maize mixed for those agriculture nerds among you, has incredibly high potential for increased production. Right now, smallholder farmers in those countries are lucky to see maize yields of two tons per hectare. Whereas, in the United States, our farmers average over 10 tons per hectare.

The governments in these countries also have laid out a vision for themselves to become part of a regional agricultural powerhouse, and they have committed to leading the way to make it a reality. It is important to note that all three of these countries are members of what we call our Democracy Delivers Initiative which pays extra attention to those countries experiencing democratic openings. Where there are high level commitments to reform sometimes staggered roads and fits and starts to achieving those reforms, but nonetheless, leaders who have committed to making reforms to better address their people's most pressing needs.

Finally, as Jake mentioned, our investments in the Lobito Corridor aligned perfectly, helping to build the hard infrastructure that farmers need to receive affordable agricultural inputs, and then again, as Jake spoke to, transport what they grow to markets across the region. So, as Jake has said, we are concentrating $80 million of new Feed the Future funding in these three countries.

We will use our know-how, our farmer-to-farmer connections, the improved seed varieties that have been brought online and modern, and ever-refining fertilizer application techniques to help farmers both raise their maize yields and plant other crops along with maize that strengthen their soils and boost nutrition.

Our analysis shows that US investments totaling $80 million per year for three years would lift 400,000 people out of poverty and spare an additional 550,000 people from the chronic hunger that we have seen afflicting so many in these countries. We anticipate that we have the potential to boost their combined GDP by $411 million over the same period.

And, agricultural yields should skyrocket, potentially increasing corn harvests by up to 1.5 million metric tons per year and being harvested by 155,000 metric tons per year. Outcomes like these are life changing, and they, actually what I've just described probably undersells the impact. Feed the Future's work is going to build on nearly half a billion dollars of other existing U.S. government investment from the Development Finance Corporation, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of State's vision for adapted crops and soils, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. I think Alice Albright is here somewhere today. Yes, right in front of me. Thank you so much, Alice, for everything you and MCC are doing in this space.

At the same time, Jake talked about how important it is to be catalytic. Leading global and local companies are seeing this opportunity and as a result are investing a collective $150 million of their own money in food systems across these three accelerator countries, and we hope that this is only going to snowball. And we expect it will.

ofi is here. They are one of the largest coffee suppliers in the world, a key partner to Starbucks and JDE Peet's, and they are preparing to invest $80 million in coffee supply chains in Tanzania and Zambia over the next four years. Pixis, who I saw in action in Malawi, the US agricultural company is investing $30 million in Malawi to support groundnut production. Cargill is here. They are supporting production and consumption of nutrition rich sweet potatoes in Tanzania. Acumen, the impact investing fund, is with us. They are dedicating more than six million dollars to expanding access to clean energy in remote areas. And, Bayer is here and working with us closely, and I'm not going to spoil it. We will hear what they've got in store, uh, shortly.

This tidal wave of support and investment draws in other types of partners as well. Donor countries, NGOs. One example is our work with the Government of Ireland, who I want to give a, uh, particular and not biased shoutout to, which has already joined the United States in making a combined $75 million investment in Malawi's food systems, and now we are expanding the U.S.-Ireland collaboration into Zambia, working together to tackle under nutrition and to build climate resilience. And, I have to say to the Irish government just to see Ireland pushing so, or operating so above its weight - for such a small country to be making such substantial investments, particularly as a percentage of GDP, it really helps us in our other donor engagements to try to crowd in others. So, thank you. Thank you in more ways than one.

You can see that by identifying where our dollars are going the furthest, making a big bet on that potential, and then encouraging others to embrace the same transformative vision, we are able to amplify our investment many times over and we know up here on Capitol Hill that we have a responsibility to amplify our investment many times over.

Together we will create an engine that can help feed hungry people, not just in these three countries, but across the African continent. And that is the kind of long term resilience that will reduce pressure on the U.S. taxpayer to fund constant emergency responses, and it will free up our dollars to catalyze even more of these sustainable development transformations around the world.

This new Feed the Future Accelerator strategy is the product of serious reflection and rigorous analysis. We believe that it can mark a turning point in our fight against global hunger. Thank you so much for being a part of it and for all you do.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.