Through Feed the Future Phase 2 under the Global Food Security Strategy, the U.S. Government is renewing its commitment to reducing poverty and hunger through inclusive agricultural growth, with a focus on harnessing the power of research and innovation and the private sector in order to transform agricultural development. With the global demand for land and natural resources increasing, there is a clear need to address emerging issues such as land degradation, depleting water reserves, resource consumption and transparent and efficient land tenure. The global community must freshly consider the approaches, partnerships, innovations, policies and funding necessary to take bold and effective action towards ending hunger and addressing undernutrition while accelerating agricultural sustainability, poverty alleviation and gender equality. They must do so in the context of changing environmental conditions, increased resource demands and limited availability of land.

A key to meeting a food-secure future is through the building and implementation of policy actions that support increased food security and environmental resilience. Attaining food security requires building policy that is based on evidence that focuses on integrated framing of the issues and challenges involved in the interactions between food security and global environmental change. These agendas need to be determined by a range of stakeholders that include the policy and decision makers who struggle daily with meeting both food security and environmental objectives. Challenges include responding to new needs for developing adaptation agendas and facilitating communication amongst policy-makers, resource managers and researchers working at a range of levels on spatial, temporal and jurisdictional scales. Further, developing research agendas in support of food security policy formulation needs to recognize that setting such policy is complicated, needs systematic analysis that cuts across these scales and levels, and is only going to become more complicated under the pressure of global environmental change.

Policies that strengthen the economic and governance drivers of sustainable agriculture and natural resource management catalyze increases in agricultural productivity and long-term resilience. The foundation for effectively implementing such policies is an institutional architecture for improved policy formulation and enforcement. This foundation gives rise to more secure resource rights; improved water policy; and improved alignment of agriculture, environment and environmental resilience policy. These outcomes lead to strengthened policy institutions and stronger linkages with other sectors. Strengthened policies and policy institutions lead to better management of land and resources, including better private sector management, enhanced smallholder investments and improved planning within and across multiple locations and geographies.

Feed the Future continues to support improved land, resource and water policy through activities that serve the broader objectives of Feed the Future and are outlined in the Global Food Security Strategy as essential to advancing food security and building long-term resilience.  To learn more about developing building a framework for improved policy development and institutional architecture to support such policies, join Agrilinks in June for our Policy and Governance month.