The U.S Government's Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Chief Executive Officer, Daniel W. Yohannes, and United Nations World Food Program (WFP) Executive Director, Josette Sheeran, on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding in Washington to scale up global economic growth, poverty alleviation and food security efforts.
MCC and WFP have been working together in Ghana, where WFP recently bought 1,000 metric tons of maize worth US$360,000 enough to feed 70,000 people, from farmers and farmer-based organizations mostly trained through MCC-funded programmes, as part of the UN agency's Purchase for Progress (P4P) initiative.
P4P is an innovative programme that seeks to leverage WFP's purchasing power and link small scale farmers to markets in 20 countries, according to a statement issued in Accra on Tuesday by MCC.
"Achieving MCC's commitment to poverty reduction through economic growth requires partnering with those, who share our vision for a world of greater opportunity and prosperity, for the poor and vulnerable," said Mr Yohannes.
"MCC finds such a friend and partner in the World Food Programme, which is pursuing innovation and results in advancing food security around the world.
"This is the kind of partnership that unleashes the potential of smallholder farmers, who hold the key to food security," said WFP Executive Director Sheeran.
"Connecting small farmers to markets helps transform local economies and can transform nations."
The memorandum builds on a previous memorandum signed between MCC and WFP in December 2008 to expand the affordability and availability of food for the world's poor.
Under that first memorandum, MCC and WFP built a solid foundation for sustainability and collaboration in the global agricultural sector.
In addition to training farmers, MCC will fund the construction of agribusiness centres, which are post-harvest facilities where farmers can sell or store their crops.
These privately-operated agribusiness centres are critical to the development of Ghana's grain sector and will provide a reliable source of supply for WFP's P4P and other WFP regional purchase programmes.
The statement said cooperation would continue in Ghana, and would likely extend to other countries, including Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Mali and Senegal, where MCC and WFP both had active projects.
The collaboration of MCC and WFP is intended to improve and stabilize food security through a number of concrete measures, including increases in agricultural productivity; improved access to credit; investments and training across the value chain.