Now is the time to be ambitious and break the cycle of hunger and poverty, was the message Gordon Conway and other international experts conveyed in a letter to G8 leaders on 16th May.

A call to action 

Now is the time to be ambitious and break the cycle of hunger and poverty, was the message Gordon Conway and other international experts conveyed in a letter to G8 leaders on 16th May.

The full letter can be read here 

The signatories, including Bob Geldof, Mary Robinson, Roger Thurow and Tom Arnold, called for the following four measures to be taken at the 2012 G8 Summit:

• Decades of underinvestment in both smallholder agriculture and nutrition programmes must be overturned. The historic investments in the G8’s 2009 L’Aquila food security initiative must be urgently delivered before L’Aquila commitments expire at the end of this year. G8 leaders must commit to extend and renew these public financial commitments, beyond 2012, prioritising support for women smallholder producers, sustainable farming approaches, and proven solutions to reducing childhood malnutrition.

• G8 leaders must set impact targets to pull 50 million people out of poverty through agriculture and save at least 15 million children from stunting. There are 30 low-income countries which are already fighting hunger through agriculture investment plans and 18 of them are committed to tackling malnutrition through their involvement in the groundbreaking Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement. G8 leaders should set this target as an intermediary goal in reaching the World Health Organization’s target to reduce stunting globally by 40 percent over the next 10 years.

• Public and private sector investments must clearly demonstrate how they will benefit smallholder farmers and be tied to development indicators.

• Provide fast and flexible support to national governments such as through the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme (GAFSP) Public Sector Window that is focused on funding gaps in country agricultural development and food security investment plans.

Gordon Conway is a member of the Advisory Group of the Global Agricultural Development Initiative of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and will be attending the Council’s Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security on 18^th May, at which the US Government will launch the 2012 G8 deliverables on food security.  More information on this event can be found here.