A Call for a Strategic U.S. Approach to the Global Food Crisis

July 28, 2008

In May 2008, in response to the growing global food crisis, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) launched a task force to assess the rising humanitarian, security, developmental, and market impacts of rising food costs and shortages. Its cochairs, Senators Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) and Robert P. Casey (D-PA) charged the task force with identifying, by late July 2008, a feasible but bold plan of action that the Bush administration, the presidential campaigns, Congress, and the next administration could embrace on a bipartisan basis. The result, outlined in the following report, is an argument for modernizing and doubling emergency assistance, elevating rural development and agricultural productivity to be new foreign policy priorities, revising the U.S. approach to biofuels so that fuel and food security objectives are effectively de-conflicted, acting on an urgent basis to conclude the Doha Development Round, and creating a strategic U.S. approach to global food security that interlinks approaches to relief, development, energy, and trade and that is backed by new robust organizational capacities.