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Question: Global Issues

Contrast successful and unsuccessful international initiatives to deal with specific global problems. Explain what can be learned from these successes and failures.

Initiative: and act or strategy intended to resolve a difficulty or improve a situation; a fresh approach to something

The problems with food availability around the globe -that everyone has a right to have access to healthy food but that is obviously not the case-, cannot be solved within nations, meaning that only initiatives in global base can have efficient solutions. As the initiative gets specific, its efficiency declines measurably.

To begin with, international initiatives taken have been more effective than local initiatives.

Trade Lead System (TLD) A small sized Japanese company, Fukushima Shoji imported food from a small USA

Company Das Foods. This way both companies got a chance to compete with the big markets that produce unhealthy food.

“After the improvements were made, Fukushima Shoji received 18 potential suppliers as opposed to the four received earlier”

The sale was only $20.000, but with this initiative continuing, future selling is being expected to get up to $70.000 in a year.

Menu Planner for Schools The four points of the initiative are “commit to having a marketing plan; empower staff to

achieve quality service; be customer-oriented; and target your customers” The intended audience and purpose is very specific: the school administrations. Only

works on the issues with school lunches in USA. This initiative can work for schools specifically but it cannot solve the problem as a whole.

If they are intending to apply this method to every single aspect of the issue, that would work. Yet, neither money nor time is enough for that.

In addition, initiatives taken on an area bases have been unsuccessful due to the lack of a global perspective.

Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) 24 November 2010, Rome - A growing number of countries are taking steps to

catalogue, conserve and better manage the genetic diversity of livestock in order to help safeguard the resilience of the world's food production systems, says an informal FAO survey released today”

With a survey FAO saw that many countries have started taking action recently about the issue after the initiative has been released.

Since then, countries have begun to take action in line with the Global Plan.In the policy arena, ten countries report that they have established and are implementing national strategies for managing animal genetic resources.”

Supermarkets in New York New York City must address the significant and growing need for supermarkets and

food resources in its neighborhoods “A key goal of this initiative is to stimulate the development of supermarkets in

lower-income neighborhoods” (par 1). Even though this is a good purpose, it is not enough.

Supermarkets later withdrew from many communities, leaving many neighborhoods and large numbers of people without a stable food supply.

Furthermore, initiatives taken nationally only focus on the citizens of the nation at hand.

US Global Food Security Initiative It is based on five principles: “support for comprehensive strategies; investment through

country owned plans; stronger coordination among donors; leveraging effective multilateral institutions; and sustained commitments”

They work on adopting a comprehensive approach to food security; investing new plans; strengthening the strategic coordination; finding next steps for improvement.

They take multilateral assistance from World Bank, WFP, FAO and IFAD. With these organizations they intend to solve the issue faster, and reduce the number of needy people.

Berg, Doing What Works But it is also clear that the safety net is in desperate need of reform. The current safety net is

a confusing array of programs, with 15 different nutrition assistance programs run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture alone, each of which have different eligibility requirements, application procedures, and physical locations that people must visit to apply”

A 2007 study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that domestic hunger and food insecurity cost the American economy $90 billion annually.” (pg.2). What about other countries? With these kind of data, their solutions would only be for USA, thus do not work.

“Thomas Z. Freedman, suggested calling this idea the “American Family Food, Opportunity, and Responsibility” program, or AFFORD.” (pg. 3).

As proven, local initiatives cannot exceed borders while food availability is a global issue that requires a larger perspective.