Development Works Number 4, August 2012

Number 4, August 2012 Development Works Bread for the World Institute provides policy analysis on hunger and strategies to end it. The Institute educates opinion leaders, policy makers and the public about hunger in the United States and abroad. Snapshot • Strengthening global partnerships for development can help the United States make a deeper impact on hunger and extreme poverty around the world. These issues require collective action; no one country has enough power or resources to solve the problem. Richard Lord • Multilateral cooperation enables the global community to pool resources, share knowledge of what is working well, and identify and fill funding gaps in the most promising programs. In international development, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. U.S. development partnerships complement the efforts of people working toward a better life, such as this Nepali woman on one of her daily trips to bring home clean water. Leadership and Teamwork: The U.S. Role in Development The United States has spent much of its 250 years of independence as a leading industrial nation, and for the past several decades, it has enjoyed “superpower” status. Today, most Americans see the country as a global leader—it’s part of our national identity. Opinions vary, though, as to what this type of leadership means in practice—how it should affect the nation’s actions. What does leadership mean in the field of international development? Creating, strengthening, and sustaining global partnerships for development can help the United States make a wider, deeper, and more long-term impact on a problem most Americans care about: global hunger and extreme poverty. 1 • U.S. leadership is essential to global action on food security— it persuades others to act. A 2009 U.S. proposal to invest significantly more resources in agriculture won support from donors in the “Group of 8” (G-8) developed nations, who committed to providing $22 billion to improve agricultural productivity over three years. In contrast, when the United States reduced its support for agricultural development in the late 1980s, the efforts of most other developed countries waned as well.