Today, 795 million people around the world do not have access to a sufficient supply of safe and nutritious food. The United Nations estimates that worldwide demand for food will increase 70 percent by 2050. To meet this need, production in developing countries will need to almost double.

Establishing global food security is important not only to hundreds of millions of hungry people, but also to the sustainable economic growth of developing nations and the long-term economic prosperity of the United States. As we help countries become more food secure and raise incomes, we also expand markets for American producers. For example, between fiscal years 2010 and 2014, U.S. agricultural exports to developing countries grew 44.3 percent for developing countries, significantly outpacing the 33.4 percent for developed countries. Exports to Southeast Asia grew 56.5 percent.

In 2009, G8 nations committed to act with the scale and urgency needed to achieve sustainable global food security and to be accountable and coordinate with country development plans. In the subsequent years, the United States has invested over $3.75 billion to address global food security, exceeding the President's commitment, and launched his Feed the Future Initiative. USDA is a key member of the whole of government effort on Feed the Future and supports global food security through in-country capacity building, basic and applied research, and support for improved market information, statistics and analysis. Around the world, USDA has helped to train small farmers and foreign officials on plant and animal health systems, risk analysis, and avoiding post-harvest loss; completed assessments on climate change; and helped to increase agricultural productivity.

Building Local Capacity, Increasing Productivity, and Improving Markets and Trade

USDA staff members are strategically placed to monitor agricultural matters globally in more than 160 countries and assist in USDA's efforts to build local capacity. Since 2010, USDA has aligned its program with the Feed the Future Initiative to support agriculture development in select focus countries and regions?Ghana, Kenya, East Africa, Bangladesh, Haiti, Guatemala and Central America?and worked in all 19 of the Initiative's priority countries.

• Over the past six years, USDA's international food aid programs benefited approximately 48.3 million individuals globally, with assistance valued at nearly $2.2 billion.
• Over the past six years, USDA's McGovern- Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program supported the education, child development, and food security of some 26 million of the world's poorest children in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
• With the support of the McGovern Dole program, the United Nations World Food Program provides a daily breakfast of rice, canned fish, vitamin A-fortified vegetable oil, and yellow split peas to feed pre- and primary school students in Siem Reap and two other provinces in Cambodia. The project also provides food scholarships, in the form of take home rations, to poor students as an income-based incentive to encourage poor food-insecure households to send their children to school regularly to increase student attendance and retention rates.
• The McGovern Dole Food for Education program provided training to over 132,000 people on child health and nutrition. Projects have trained health professionals, primary health care workers, community health workers, volunteers, and non-health personnel such as teachers, school administrators and parents.
• In Mali, for example, as part of USDA's partnership with Catholic Relief Services over 2,000 people have been trained in basic health and nutrition practices such as child growth and development, malnutrition, and how to prepare nutritious foods using locally available foods such as millet, peanuts and beans.
• In order support the sustainability of McGovern Dole efforts, projects aim to create long-lasting public-private partnerships with businesses and producers. While USDA has just started to track these efforts, in the past year, 258 public-private partnerships have been formed. Many of the public-private partnerships formed under the McGovern Dole program are partnerships between producer groups who commit to providing food to local schools, supplementing food provided by USDA.
• In Malawi, for example, the USDA McGovern Dole project implemented by WFP has developed 90 partnerships with farmer group associations that provide a diverse selection of local produce, such as maize, beans and vegetables to their local primary schools as part of the Government of Malawi-supported pilot Home Grown School Feeding model.

USDA's Food for Progress program helps developing countries and emerging democracies modernize and strengthen their agricultural sectors. The two principle objectives of Food for Progress are increasing agricultural productivity and expanding trade of agricultural products. In fiscal year 2014, nearly 223, 337 individuals in the Feed the Future countries and regions received USDA's agricultural productivity or food security training.

• Food for Progress projects have trained farmers in animal and plant health and improved techniques and technologies on and off farm. In 2014, over 220,000 producers received training on agricultural sector productivity or food security training as a result of USDA assistance.
• In Honduras, the Food for Progress program implemented by USDA's partner TechnoServe, Inc., and focused on the coffee and bean sector, trained 13,406 men and 3,357 women in improved agricultural techniques and technologies. In the coffee sector, training was provided in areas such as Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), post-harvest handling, and helping farmers better understand the causes of common coffee bean defects and expectations of international buyers making purchasing decisions.
• As a result of USDA training in improved techniques and technologies, over 80,000 producers in fiscal year 2014 have adopted one or more improved techniques or management practices. Through USDA's partner, National Cooperative Business Association, more than 19,000 Ugandans have adopted conservation farming practices to their maize, pulse and soybean cultivation. Adopting these practices has led to an average increase in yields of about 47%.
• Farmers adopting improved techniques or technologies in their farming practices have resulted in almost 64,000 hectares of land cultivated under USDA-promoted improved techniques or management practices in nine countries in fiscal year 2014 in Africa and Latin America.
• Counterpart International, in coordination with the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture's formal extension agents, has held over 83 trainings for agricultural producers in Huehuetenango and San Marcos on topics such as soil conservation, water management, integrated pest management, and post-harvest management. While still early in the project, these trainings have resulted in over 2,426 hectares of land cultivated under USDA-promoted improved techniques and technologies.
• USDA programs often support increased access to and utilization of financial services in order to expand agricultural productivity and markets and trade. Making more financial loans shows that there is improved access to business development for producers, cooperatives, MSMEs and business enterprises including producers, service providers and manufacturers. In fiscal year 2014, USDA supported $12.6 million in agricultural and rural loans in Bangladesh, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mali and Tanzania.
• Last year, USDA's Food for Progress program efforts resulted in close to 10,000 jobs. In Honduras, for example, this has meant that 1,670 new on-farm full-time jobs and 215 new post-production jobs in the coffee and bean sector were attributed to USDA's work through its partnership with TechnoServe, Inc.

Two of USDA's premier trade and scientific exchange programs play an important role in USDA's food security initiatives:

• The Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellowship Program (Borlaug Fellowship Program or BFP) promotes food security and economic growth by providing training and collaborative research opportunities to fellows from developing and middle-income countries. Borlaug fellows are scientists, researchers, or policymakers who are in the early or middle stages of their careers.
• Over the past six years, USDA's Borlaug Fellowship Program provided training and collaborative research opportunities to 440 scientists and policymakers from developing and middle-income countries, focusing on a wide range of agriculture-related topics including agronomy, veterinary science, nutrition, food safety, sanitary and phytosanitary issues, natural resource management, and biotechnology.
• The Cochran Fellowship Program strengthens and enhances trade linkages between eligible middle-income and emerging market countries and agricultural interest in the U.S. The Cochran program also assists eligible countries to develop agricultural systems necessary to meet the food and fiber needs of their domestic populations by providing training opportunities for senior and mid-level specialists and administrators working in agricultural trade and policy, agribusiness development, management, animal, plant, and food sciences, extension services, agricultural marketing, and many other areas.
• Over the past six years, USDA's Cochran Fellowship Program trained 3,148 agricultural professionals worldwide in areas related to agricultural trade, agribusiness development, management, policy, and marketing.

Driving Innovation through Research and Technologies

Since 2009, USDA has expanded analysis and reporting to increase core data, statistics, and analysis of global agricultural systems. In 2011, USDA expanded its annual Food Security Assessment to include 77 countries; completed assessments of agricultural statistics and market information in ten Feed the Future countries and identified key areas where improvement is needed; and conducted in-depth assessments of the capacity of the statistical systems of Ghana, Haiti, Malawi, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Bangladesh.

• In 2014, USDA conducted in-depth country assessments of agricultural statistics and market information systems in Benin, Malawi, and Senegal. An on-going agricultural statistics project in Haiti resulted in the first country wide agricultural production survey data release. Tanzania conducted a cognitive pre-test of point sample area frame methodology for an Annual Agricultural Sample Survey.

Important research on solving food production issues continues:

• USDA researchers sequenced the genome of wheat and the wheat stem rust pathogen, which threatens to destroy wheat crops worldwide, and distributed new wheat germplasm globally to reduce the risk of unproductive harvests.
• USDA continues research to combat aflatoxin (mycotoxins can be lethally toxic in high dosages or cause dilatory health effects over the long-term in smaller dosages) through genetic resistance in maize and using RNAi approaches in peanut.
• In partnership with USAID, USDA is part of an international consortium to develop a safe and economically sustainable vaccine for the pathogen that causes East Coast Fever (ECF), a devastating disease of cattle of eastern Africa.
• USDA is cooperating with over a dozen institutions in the United States and developing countries to provide resource poor farmers with dry bean cultivars with improved productivity and quality. Researchers have identified broad spectrum resistance to rust in large seeded landrace cultivars that originate from Tanzania. These landraces, with confirmed resistance in field trials in Africa and the United States, provide breeders with a valuable source of rust resistance for improving large-seeded African cultivars used by small-holder farmers.
• In 2013, the United States, along with the United Kingdom, launched the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition initiative, which seeks to support global efforts to make agricultural and nutritionally relevant data available, accessible, and usable for unrestricted use worldwide. The initiative encourages collaboration and cooperation among existing agriculture and open data activities. Open access to research, and open publication of data, are vital resources for food security and nutrition, driven by farmers, farmer organizations, researchers, extension experts, policy makers, governments, and other private sector and civil society stakeholders participating in "innovation systems" and along value chains.

Over the past six years, USDA has worked with private landowners to implement voluntary conservation practices that conserve and clean the water we drink. USDA support?leveraged with historic outside investments?boosts producer incomes and rewards them for their good work. At the same time, USDA investments have brought high quality water and waste services to rural communities, which are vital to their continued health and economic viability. Examples of results achieved by USDA's investments since 2009 to improve water quality and availability include :

• As a result of record enrollment of private working lands in conservation programs over the past six years, nitrogen in runoff from farm fields has been reduced by over 3.5 billion pounds, or nearly 600 million pounds per year. Phosphorus runoff has been reduced by over 700 million pounds since 2009.
• Brought clean drinking water and better waste water management to 14.5 million rural residents through 7,000 loans and grants for water and waste water community infrastructure projects. Quality water and waste services not only help ensure rural places have access to clean water, but also support jobs and help communities retain and attract new businesses and families. USDA investments in water and waste water projects have helped to create or save approximately 150,000 jobs in rural communities.
• Leveraged partner investments through the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) to put further resources toward projects that foster water conservation and resilience. In the first round of RCPP funding last year, USDA delivered more than $370 million to 115 high-impact conservation projects across all 50 states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Water quality was the most common project objective, ranging from locally-focused efforts to help producers meet water quality regulations to watershed-scale efforts to drive tangible improvement in major water bodies. In May 2015, up to $225 million was made available for a second round of RCPP projects for targeted conservation, with drought and water conservation identified as a priority for potential projects. In more than 60 percent of project pre-proposals received for this next round of funding, partners identified water resource issues as a primary objective.
• Through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), USDA is working with producers to re-establish valuable land cover to help improve water quality, prevent soil erosion, and reduce loss of wildlife habitat. Nitrogen and phosphorus leaving CRP fields are 95 and 86 percent less, respectively, compared to land that is cropped. Soil erosion has been reduced by an annual average rate of 325 million tons, or 8 billion tons since the program started in 1985. That is equivalent to 480 million dump trucks of soil, enough trucks lined up to reach around the world 128 times.
• Conducted restoration work on 2.9 million acres of Forest Service-managed land in Fiscal Year 2014 that sustained or restored watershed conditions, despite rising costs of firefighting that drain resources from forest restoration and management activities. USDA's Forest Service manages public lands that provide 20 percent of the nation's clean water supply and the drinking water for 60 million Americans, a value estimated at $7.2 billion per year. To help protect and maintain water quality, the Forest Service's National Best Management Practices (BMP) Program initiated nationally consistent monitoring of the implementation and effectiveness of its National Core BMPs, completing more than 1,100 evaluations on National Forest System lands.
• Quadrupled the number of contracts since 2010 that address water quality concerns in the Mississippi River basin, resulting in the 2014 delisting of two Arkansas stream segments that are downstream of projects in the Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative (MRBI). USDA has worked with more than 600 partners and 5,000 private landowners to improve more than 1 million acres in the basin. Findings from a 2014 report by the USDA's Conservation Effects Assessment Project show that conservation work on cropland in the Mississippi River basin has reduced the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus flowing to the Gulf of Mexico by 18 and 20 percent, respectively.
• Invested $57 million in the Lake Erie basin to help farmers implement conservation practices that benefit water quality and reduce the amount of nutrients entering the region's watersheds, one of the sources of disruptive algae blooms. Studies indicate that between 2009 and 2014, the new steps farmers have taken with USDA assistance have reduced annual nutrient and sediment losses by approximately 7 million pounds of nitrogen, 1.2 million pounds of phosphorus, and 488,000 tons of sediment in the Lake Erie basin.
• From 2012 to 2014, NRCS has invested more than $1.5 billion to help producers manage acute drought conditions and increase the resilience of their operations against extreme weather events. On average, these producers contribute half the cost of implementing practices. Investments include :
• $638 million to help producers increase irrigation efficiency. Improvements in irrigation can help maintain the long-term viability of the irrigated agriculture sector. Water savings at the farm level can help offset the effect of rising water costs and reduce expenditures for energy, chemicals, and labor inputs, while enhancing revenues through high crop yields and improved crop quality.
• $481 million to implement soil health practices, helping farmers save money and improve their operation's efficiency while at the same time improving the water quality that leaves the fields. Cover crops, no-till and residue management are a few conservation practices that can mitigate impacts of drought. An increase in organic matter is the best outcome - each pound of organic matter can hold up to 20 pounds of water.
• $410 million to help ranchers implement rangeland management practices such as prescribed grazing, watering facilities, forage harvesting and brush management. These practices help ranchers adapt to dry conditions in two main ways?increasing the availability and suitability of forage, and ensuring that cattle have an adequate and reliable source of water.

Additional USDA investments in water quality include :

• Ogallala Aquifer: Invested approximately $72.5 million since 2011 in financial assistance to help more than 1,500 producers conserve water on 325,000 acres in the Ogallala Aquifer. Underlying the Great Plains in eight states, the Ogallala supports nearly one-fifth of the wheat, corn, cotton and cattle produced in the United States and makes up 30 percent of all groundwater used for irrigation across the country.
• Water Quality Trading: USDA has provided financial and technical assistance to help states and other partners establish water quality trading markets, largely through its Conservation Innovation Grants program. In 2014, the Ohio River Basin water quality trading project announced its first trades between farmers and utilities. In 2015, an additional 6 projects were awarded over $2 million in CIG funding to establish water quality trading opportunities across the country.
• Watershed Dams: USDA helped rural communities maintain local watersheds and reduce the impacts of extreme precipitation and drought by rejuvenating flood control dams. In fiscal years 2014 and 2015, USDA provided more than $324 million to over 800 watershed dam rehabilitation assessments and projects nationwide. USDA's watershed projects across the nation provide an estimated $2.2 billion in annual benefits in reduced flooding and erosion damages, and improved recreation, water supplies and wildlife habitat for an estimated 47 million Americans. USDA recently launched DamWatch, a new web-based application that provides real-time monitoring of rainfall, snowmelt, stream flow and seismic events that could pose potential threats to dam safety. Nearly 12,000 dams in 47 states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico help to prevent flooding and erosion damage, provide recreational opportunities, improve water supply and create habitat for wildlife.

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Those who call rural America home know that there's more to the rural economy than just farms and ranches. The potential to grow and make innovative products in rural America is limitless, and manufacturing is particularly important for rural communities. Rural America makes a wide array of products including light manufacturing tools, automotive parts, clothing and apparel, crafts, forest products, and services. In 2013, manufacturing accounted for nearly 2.5 million rural jobs nationwide.

Between fiscal years 2009 and 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has invested $2.5 billion to help rural manufacturers across the country increase production and capacity, move products to market at home and abroad, and support good paying jobs in rural communities. To learn more about how USDA invests in rural communities and businesses to help them grow, visit www.usda.gov/results.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7, 2015 - The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) today announced nearly $3 million in grants to address critical issues affecting agriculturally-important plants and animals. The science developed from these grants will provide timely assistance and have an immediate impact for the agriculture community. The awards were made under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative's (AFRI) Critical Agricultural Research and Extension (CARE) program, and addresses priority areas of the 2014 Farm Bill.

"It is essential to promote partnerships between researchers, extension experts, and producers to ensure the success of American agriculture," said Sonny Ramaswamy, NIFA director. "The CARE program is centered on the swift identification of problems, creation of solutions, and prevention of interruptions or issues that impact farmers' ability to provide a safe and abundant food supply for our nation."

Fiscal year 2014 is the first year NIFA has made awards under the CARE program. Examples of what these grants will focus on include a project from the University of Georgia that is researching disease management practices for blueberries, particularly addressing the currently unknown life cycle time of the damaging Exobasidium leaf and fruit spot disease. An Extension project from Montana State University will be working directly with cattle producers to adopt sagebrush grazing techniques for their cattle that create a sustainable environment for the greater sage-grouse. Fiscal Year 2014 grants include :

• University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla., $149,399
• University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla., $149,580
• University of Georgia, Athens, Ga., $149,925
• University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, $149,884
• Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., $149,995
• Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kan., $149.988
• Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich., $149,655
• Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich., $149,899
• Montana State University, Bozeman, Mont., $149,924
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Neb., $148,203
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Neb., $148,209
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Neb., $150,000
• Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., $150,000
• North Carolina State University, Raleigh, N.C., $149,800
• Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pa., $150,000
• South Dakota State University, Brookings, S.D., $149,999
• University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Knoxville, Tenn., $150,000
• University of Vermont, Burlington, Vt., $141,807
• Washington State University, Pullman, Wash., $149,837
• University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisc., $149,992

AFRI is NIFA's flagship competitive grants program and was established under the 2008 Farm Bill. The AFRI Foundational Program addresses six priority areas to continue building a foundation of knowledge in fundamental and applied food and agricultural sciences critical for solving current and future societal challenges. The six priority areas include : plant health and production and plant products; animal health and production and animal products; food safety, nutrition and health; renewable energy, natural resources and environment; agriculture systems and technology; and agriculture economics and rural communities.

NIFA invests in and advances agricultural research, education, and extension and seeks to make transformative discoveries that solve societal challenges. To learn more about NIFA's impact on agricultural science, visit nifa.usda.gov/impacts or follow us on Twitter: @usda_nifa #NIFAimpacts.

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