Feed The Future: Global Food Security Research Strategy

The President’s Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, titled “Feed the Future (FTF)”, has the overarching goal of sustainably reducing global poverty and hunger (www.feedthefuture.gov). Providing sufficient food to the world’s growing population will require a 70 percent increase in agricultural production by 2050 (Bruinsma 2009). To meet this food security challenge under constraints of limited agricultural land availability and increased climatic variability, the world will need to support and develop scientific and technological innovations that increase agricultural productivity in an environmentally sound manner while improving the availability of nutritious foods.

The food price spikes of 2006-2008 and that are resurfacing today underscore the fragility of global food security, with recent estimates that nearly a billion people are food insecure (Shapouri 2010), affecting families in the United States and around the world. While the causes were many, the underlying challenges are clear: the world cannot achieve the Millennium Development Goals (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/) relating to hunger, poverty, health, gender and the environment when the growth of agricultural productivity and income stagnates or is otherwise insufficient. The global research portfolio, presented here, serves as an integral strategy within the broader Feed the Future Initiative.