USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah delivered a major speech entitled The Modern Development Enterprise at an event hosted by the Center for Global Development.
Food Security: Instead of merely providing food aid in times of emergency, we are helping countries develop their own agricultural sectors, so that they can feed themselves. We launched Feed the Future – bringing together resources across the federal government and engaging in deeper partnerships to extend the impact of our efforts. We are now leveraging more investment from countries themselves and from other donors. Firms ranging from General Mills to local African seed companies are all doing more. As a result, in just five of our twenty focus countries we will be able to help nearly 6.5 million poor farmers – most of them women – grow enough food to feed their families and break the grip of hunger and poverty for tens of millions of people.
"At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is create kind of commercially viable agriculture sectors in these countries to eliminate the fact that every time prices do spike a little bit, it creates a lot of unrest and a lot of human suffering".
