Subject: Glickman profile in the National Journal & WFP Statement on the FAO election
From: "Rick Leach" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2011 08:32:31 -0400

Good Morning.
FYI, following is (1) a profile on Dan from the National Journal and (2) WFP's statement on yesterday's FAO election.  I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. 

National Journal
PEOPLE
A Full Plate for Glickman
By Mike Magner
Sunday, June 26, 2011 | 12:00 p.m.

It did not go unnoticed by former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman that a simple food vendor protesting his treatment by authorities in Tunisia sparked this year’s Arab Spring.

When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the rural town where he was trying to eke out a living selling fruit, he ignited a movement that focused global attention on such issues as the cost of food, the ability to produce and sell it, and the instability arising from hunger and poverty, Glickman said.

“The world is now in a period of much tighter supplies, much higher and more volatile food prices, so that’s made food issues much more important,” he said.

After a career that included 18 years in the House, nearly six years as Agriculture secretary, and five years as chief lobbyist for the movie industry, Glickman, 66, is focusing full time on food in more than a half-dozen forums:

• He is cochairing an initiative on nutrition and health sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center, where Glickman is a senior fellow. Coleaders of the initiative launched in March are another former Agriculture secretary, Ann Veneman, and two former secretaries of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala and Mike Leavitt. Their goal is to produce recommendations in about a year on nutrition, food policy, and health and fitness issues.​
• Glickman cochairs the Initiative on Global Agriculture Development and Hunger sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The council released a report when President Obama took office on how to tackle hunger and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and a recent update gave the administration a B- for its efforts so far on global agricultural development.
​• He cochairs a multi-foundation effort called AGree that is funding research on agriculture, the environment, and rural economies.
​• He is chairman of a study by the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine on ways to address childhood obesity.
​• Glickman also serves on the boards of the Farm Foundation, the World Food Program USA, and the Food Research and Action Committee; he teaches a course on the politics of food at George Washington University; and—in his lone diversion from food policy—he is director of the Aspen Institute’s Congressional Program.​

“I guess my goal is to try my best to keep my fingers in and influence all aspects of food and agriculture policy, whether it’s farm programs, nutrition, health, global food security,” Glickman said. “We need folks like me pushing on these issues to keep them at a high-profile level for policy makers to make decisions.”

When he was a member of the House Agriculture Committee two decades ago, Glickman said that farm issues were mainly the bailiwick of rural members, and “we often were thinking of ways we could keep everybody else out of our sandbox.”

Today, nutrition and health problems cross all jurisdictional boundaries, he said. “What’s happening is, these issues of food policy have become so important that you have now a lot of people engaged in them that you never used to see before,” he said. “It used to be much more parochial.”

An emerging global crisis is the main reason that food issues have taken on critical mass, he said. “Population is going to grow from 7 billion now to 9.5 billion by 2050,” Glickman said. “India and China will become developed nations. They want to eat more, and they want to eat better.“

So we’re going to have to produce way more food in the next 30 years than we do now. And how do we do that without ripping up the land or using all the water that’s out there? There’s not much additional fresh water out there for agriculture. These are big global-security issues.”

Despite his Wichita, Kan., roots, Glickman was actually a latecomer to the world of food and agriculture. His father was a scrap-iron dealer who owned a Triple-A baseball team, the Wichita Arrows, and Glickman started a public-service career as president of the Wichita school board soon after graduating from the University of Michigan.

He moved to Washington to earn a law degree at George Washington University and worked as a trial lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission before winning a Kansas district seat in Congress in 1976.

It was a Capitol Hill aide who told Glickman that he should take on agriculture and “ ‘make it your thing,’ and I think I just kind of did,” he said. The result was his appointment as Agriculture secretary in 1995, a post he held until the end of the Clinton administration.

Glickman did a stint as chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America from 2004 to 2010, but now it’s food and farming pretty much all the time. “Somebody said to me, ‘You’re more involved in this than you ever were in your life … even when you were Ag secretary,’ ” he said. 

WFP Statement  
27 June 2011  
STATEMENT BY WFP EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR JOSETTE SHEERAN ON ELECTION OF NEW DIRECTOR GENERAL OF FAO   
I would like to congratulate Jose Graziano da Silva on his election as the new Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Brazil has achieved so much in alleviating hunger and malnutrition through innovative programs in recent years, and it is fitting that a Brazilian national is taking the helm of the FAO at a time of huge challenges and threats to global food security. The World Food Program (WFP) is working closely and collaboratively with the FAO, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to address immediate hunger needs in emergencies, and to support long-term sustainable solutions to hunger. I look forward to a further strengthening of WFP’s partnership with FAO under Jose Graziano da Silva, who was one of the architects of Brazil’s “Zero Hunger” plan that achieved so much in reducing hunger in Brazil. The work of WFP and FAO supporting smallholder farmers and helping to connect them to markets, and our focus on protecting vulnerable communities to changes in the climate will be vital in the years ahead.  
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