Latest Blog Entries

Dear Mr. President,

You have many pressing priorities on your plate as you enter into a second term, but one area where your leadership can continue to make a difference here at home and abroad is a focus on global food security. How to feed a hungry world in a sustainable manner is one of the most vexing problems we will have to face in the coming years, but not an insurmountable task.

The start of President Obama's second term and the convening of a new Congress offer the White House an important opportunity to act boldly to end hunger at home and abroad. Thousands of people of faith are praying that the president will use this new beginning to work with Congress to set a goal and enact a plan to end hunger.

We in the international community wait with anticipation as U.S. President Barack Obama assembles his foreign policy team. This group will engage the world on behalf of the United States, and it will face many difficulties in the years ahead. One of the biggest challenges facing them will be trying to bring stability to the Middle East.

The day Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast, I was in Mali, a country in West Africa’s Sahel region. As a native New Yorker, I was stunned and dismayed to see pictures of the flooded streets and tunnels of Manhattan, of destroyed homes and schools on Staten Island, and of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers displaced and in shelters. But I was even more struck by the indiscriminate nature of what I was witnessing both in Mali (one of the world’s poorest countries) and the United States (one of its richest): massive humanitarian emergencies resulting from more extreme weather.