Hill event celebrates recent successes in agriculture
Kelly Hauser
ONE Campaign blog
May 28, 2011
This week, ONE, with partners ActionAid, Alliance to End Hunger, Women Thrive and others, hosted a reception on Capitol Hill to celebrate the recent successes of US investments in agriculture to strengthen global food security.
Following the Chicago Council’s Annual Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security, the reception was a huge success. It brought together Congress, the Administration, civil society and agriculture researchers to raise the profile of the multilateral Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), and bring recognition to the great work that the US government and our partners have been doing to help improve the lot of small-scale farmers in Africa.
We were honored to have leading anti-hunger advocate Ambassador Tony Hall emcee the event. There were also keynote addresses made by Samuel Gatembeyi, a small-scale farmer from Rwanda, assistant secretary of international markets and development at the US Department of the Treasury Marisa Lago, and Julie Howard, deputy coordinator of Feed the Future.
Despite a busy voting schedule last night, the event was attended by six members of Congress, including a host committee made up of Representatives Frank Wolf, Jim McGovern, Betty McCollum, and Jo Ann Emerson:
• Rep. Jim McGovern (MA) stated that hunger is a political condition, not a natural condition, and we have the ability to solve it.
• Rep. Betty McCollum (MN) spoke about the importance of farming and gave a shout-out to Minnesota cooperative Land O’Lakes, which also does quite a bit of agricultural development in Africa and beyond.
• Rep. Frank Wolf (VA) pointed out that cutting the programs that benefit the world’s poor and hungry will never provide the significant savings that we need to balance our spending, a message that ONE volunteers have been driving home in their districts for some time.
• Jo Ann Emerson (MO) and long-time ONE champions Rep. Jim McDermott (WA) and Rep. Donald Payne (NJ) stopped by to show their support.
During the event’s keynote speeches, Rwanda was a country on people’s tongues. Attendees had the rare opportunity to hear directly from small-scale farmer Samuel Gatembeyi. Samuel leads a group of farmers in the village of Kavumu, Rwanda, and he told the story of how his life changed as a result of an agriculture program.
For the longest time, he was unable to grow anything on his hilly land, but now he, his family and his community are benefiting from a Government of Rwanda initiative to address soil erosion by making terraces in the hillside and using better farming techniques. Thanks to the US and other donors, the soil erosion project will be scaled up by the multilateral GAFSP in partnership with USAID and the Government of Rwanda, so that more of Samuel’s countrymen can learn to farm better and feed their families on a reliable basis.
When it was her turn to speak, Julie Howard made clear that Samuel’s story was not by chance. Rwanda was the first country to complete their CAADP national agricultural investment plan and the first country to work together with the US government and finish a plan for how the US should best spend its Feed the Future resources to help Rwandan become food secure.
Assistant Secretary Marisa Lago pointed out some of the more technical aspects of GAFSP that make it such a great investment –- its transparency, its strict monitoring and evaluation, and its inclusion of host governments like Rwanda in its decision-making process. The US government has committed to making a $100 million contribution to the fund this year, bringing it to one-third of what it promised at the fund’s inception.
It’s so important to reinforce what our champions are doing on Capitol Hill. The entire federal budget is under fire, and so few people realize that aid is less than 1 percent of the budget. Let’s not let them forget that we support their brave and honorable efforts. Let’s not let them forget that we support their brave and honorable efforts.