Appearing on MSNBC on Wednesday in advance of Saturday’s Global Citizen Festival in New York, Senator Bob Corker touted recent progress in his efforts to improve delivery of U.S. international food assistance using resources. Senator Corker and Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) will be featured in a video at the music festival highlighting their support for fixing inefficient practices in U.S. food aid programs. The Global Food Security Act of 2016, which passed the Senate in April and became law in July, contains a first-time authorization for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emergency Food Security Program (EFSP). USAID has relied increasingly upon EFSP to avoid constraints that would prevent delivery of emergency food aid and could provide a model for overall food aid reform.
“What we strive to do is to reform our delivery program so that we are reaching more people,” said Senator Corker. “We are still very antiquated…and we could be so much more efficient. If so, we could serve and feed four to six million people more each year.”
Senator Corker also pointed to prior enactment of additional legislation to help expand the availability of clean water and promote economic development through first-time access to electricity.
“We have done a great job on helping with clean water. We passed something this year, Electrify Africa, which is going to help 50 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have electricity that have never had it in their lives,” he said. “These are the type of initiatives that Republicans and Democrats ought to join together in because it enables us with the same amount of dollars to serve even more people.”
The Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2014 sought to improve access to clean water and sanitation around the world without spending new money or creating new bureaucracy. The Electrify Africa Act of 2015 is designed to leverage private sector resources through loan guarantees that will help provide 50 million Africans with electricity for the first time and add 20,000 megawatts of electricity to the grid by 2020.