MARGARET WARNER: And we turn to a new plan to help hunger in sub-Saharan Africa.

Suarez has that story.

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RAY SUAREZ: Food security, getting enough food to the world’s poorest people, is on the agenda this weekend as President Obama meets with other world leaders at the G8 summit in Camp David.

Across the African continent, food shortages drive instability, refugee flows, and armed conflict in places like Somalia, Kenya, Darfur, South Sudan and Ethiopia, among others.

Today, President Obama outlined a private-public partnership to work on global poverty issues and discussed plans to include four African leaders at the G8 summit. The president called lifting millions out of poverty and hunger through farming a moral obligation for both governments and businesses.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Government cannot and shouldn’t do this alone. This has to be all hands on deck.

RAY SUAREZ: The head of this country’s foreign aid agency, Dr. Rajiv Shah, unveiled the Agency for International Development’s program to bring U.S. agribusiness and Africans together to improve food productivity.

I talked with USAID Administrator Dr. Shah this afternoon.

Dr. Shah, welcome back to the program.

DR. RAJIV SHAH, administrator, United States Agency for International Development: Thank you. Thanks, Ray, for having me.

RAY SUAREZ: We have already briefly described the overall project and its objectives. But maybe you could talk a little bit more about how we’re going to accomplish that very grand goal, lifting 50 million people out of poverty in 10 years.

DR. RAJIV SHAH: Well, it’s actually — it’s a grand goal, but it’s an achievable goal.

And we’re going to accomplish it by bringing significant public sector investment, maintaining the commitments that President Obama and others have made over the last few years to reinvest in African agriculture and African agricultural institutions.

And we’re going to achieve that goal by bringing a whole host of exciting new partners to the table, private companies in Africa that are providing seeds to small-scale farmers, companies from India or Europe that have something to offer, improving small-scale agriculture in Africa, and American firms, firms we would recognize easily that are now committing themselves to make real businesslike investments for the purpose of making sure that a smallholder farmer, often a women, in sub-Saharan Africa can produce enough food to feed herself, feed her family, go to market, extract more value from market and move her whole community out of poverty.