President Obama signed the bipartisan Global Food Security Act of 2016 yesterday, steering $7 billion toward agricultural development and hunger-relief efforts around the world, and ensuring that both public and private operations would continue to work together to fund these efforts in Africa and other food-insecure regions. Obama announced his signing the bill at The White House Summit on Global Development, an examination of his administration’s strategies for addressing hunger, health, and poverty worldwide.
“With our alliance between government and private sector NGOs, we need to keep empowering farmers with new seeds and new technologies and new techniques that are scaled appropriately and sustainable,” Obama said.
The new law codifies into law Feed the Future, Obama’s signature foreign-aid program, which was conceived in 2009 as a multi-agency, public-private approach to foreign aid. It has since improved nutrition for nearly 18 million children, helped lower poverty rates by up to 26 percent, reversed childhood stunting up to 32 percent and helped more than 9 million farmers, food producers and rural families improve agricultural productivity, according to the White House. It also has attracted more than $150 million in funding from private companies, including Coca Cola, reports The Washington Post.
The act also made clear that it is “in the U.S. national security interest to accelerate growth that reduces poverty, hunger, and malnutrition,” says USA Today. In announcing the law, Obama said: “Development isn’t charity. It’s one of the smartest investments we can make in our shared future, in our security, in our prosperity.”