September 30, 2010

Leaders Pledge to Meet Hunger-Reduction, Other Goals by 2015

Obama Announces New Development Policy

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, President Barack Obama and other heads of state recently reaffirmed their pledge to reduce global poverty and meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

“Instead of just managing poverty, we have to offer nations and peoples a path out of poverty,” Obama says in his Sept. 22 summit speech. The president announced a new, strengthened U.S. Global Development Policy, based on broad-based economic growth that advances development as a “core pillar of American power.”

The assembly discussed at U.N. headquarters in New York Sept. 20-22 what needs to be done and how progress may be achieved in the remaining five years of the 15-year global plan. The eight MDGs commitment include goals and targets for developing nations to meet on reducing hunger; extreme poverty; maternal and child mortality; prevalence of diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria and others; gender inequality; and environmental degradation.

"It is incumbent on the international community to recommit itself, as it has through adoption of the Millennium Challenge goals, to reducing hunger and poverty in the world,” says Avram "Buzz" Guroff, ACDI/VOCA’s senior managing director of food security. “The U.N. is appropriately playing a catalytic role in that regard.”

Guroff says the international community has experienced setbacks in meeting the goal to reduce the number of 800 million underfed people by half by 2015 but points to successes in China and several sub-Saharan Africa countries, where a strong international commitment, such as the U.S. Feed the Future program, has led to successful gains against hunger.

“However, it will take greater political will at all levels if the goal is going to even be approached, let alone reached," says Guroff.

Reacting to the release of the new policy and the recommitment to the Millennium Development Goals, U.S. Global Leadership Coalition Executive Director Liz Schrayer says, “Today’s announcement from the administration on a new global development policy is truly groundbreaking and provides concrete steps for advancing development….The administration is demonstrating clear and ambitious leadership on global development.”

Learn more about ACDI/VOCA’s work in food security.