Washington — The United States is getting back into the work of helping poor, developing countries increase their agricultural output, a policy it abandoned nearly three decades ago, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said.

“We moved away from investments in agricultural productivity, toward emergency food aid [in 1981],” Clinton said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York September 25. “Revitalizing global agriculture will not be easy. In fact, this is one of the most ambitious and comprehensive diplomacy and development efforts our country has ever undertaken.”

Former President Bill Clinton, in introductory remarks for his wife, said that the United States and other wealthy nations abandoned agricultural development policies aimed at poor countries with the “naive notion” that the rich countries would just give food to hungry nations in a way that would bring economic benefit to the food-exporting countries.

“It persisted through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, including mine,” said the former president, who left office in 2001.

Secretary Clinton said that the Obama administration pledged at the G8 Summit in July to spend a minimum of $3.5 billion during the next three years to help poor countries improve food production. That is the U.S. contribution to the total G8 pledge of $20 billion to overcome hunger in poor countries.

More than 1 billion people, one-sixth of the world’s population, suffer from chronic hunger now, and global food supplies must grow by 50 percent in the next two decades to meet expected demand, according to the U.S. government.

Clinton said the world’s typical small farmer is a woman living in a village in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia or Latin America, who farms a piece of land that she does not own. She rises before dawn daily, walks kilometers to collect water and works all day in a field, sometimes with a baby strapped to her back.

“If she’s lucky, drought, blight or pests don’t destroy her crops, and she raises enough to feed her family and maybe has some left over to sell. But there’s no road to the nearest market, and no one to buy from her anyway. Everyone else is as poor as she is,” Clinton said.

In contrast to the female farmer, Clinton said, a young man lives in a crowded city 120 kilometers away, where he has no job or a job that pays pennies. When he goes to a market, he finds food that is rotting or priced beyond his reach. “He is hungry and often angry,” Clinton said. “The daily effort to grow, buy or sell food is the defining struggle of their lives.”

The Obama administration’s policy of agricultural development will be guided by five principles, according to Clinton:

• Allow each country to define its agricultural investment needs.

• Address the underlying causes of hunger, and put women at the heart of efforts to find solutions. “We have seen again and again, in microfinance and other programs, that women are entrepreneurial, accountable and practical. They invest their earnings in their families and communities. And they pay back loans at a higher rate than is the norm,” she said.

• Improve coordination at the country, regional and global levels to avoid duplication of efforts.

• Use multilateral development organizations, such as the World Bank.

• Stay the course. “It may take years, even decades, before we reach the finish line. But we’re going to give it all we have, in the time that we are able to,” Clinton said.

“This is one of the most ambitious and comprehensive diplomatic and development efforts our country has ever undertaken,” Clinton said. “But it can and will be done.”

See the transcript of Secretary Clinton’s remarks.