united kingdom

Today with over 7 billion people on Earth, nearly 800 million people struggle with debilitating hunger and malnutrition in every corner of the globe. That’s one in every nine people, with the majority being women and children. Experts tell us we currently produce enough food to feed everyone, so why do so many people go to bed hungry every day? We believe that by making agriculture and nutrition data available, accessible, and usable for unrestricted use worldwide, we will enable the creation of innovative solutions to eliminate hunger.

Poor connections between production and distribution, limited knowledge sharing about what crops grow best where, and incomplete access to information about agricultural markets all contribute to global food insecurity. Agriculture and nutrition data can help.

March is National Nutrition Month. Throughout the month, USDA will be highlighting results of our efforts to improve access to safe, healthy food for all Americans and supporting the health of our next generation.

The upsurge in healthy eating and food security campaigns is really resonating with schoolchildren, so much so, that a day has been set aside for youth around the world to share their experiences.  The celebration of this movement – International School Meals Day – draws our attention to the importance of good nutrition for all children.

March 3 marks the fourth consecutive year that USDA will partner with the United Kingdom to invite children from across the globe to promote nutrition and school meals, this year focusing on introducing fresh and healthy local fare into their diets. On that day children will connect through social media to share their food experiences and healthy eating habits.

At the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leaders across the globe, in the public, non-governmental, and private sectors, committed to sharing and using data and to investing in the capacity to collect and analyze this data for sustainable development. Open data, particularly open data relevant to agriculture and nutrition, is a powerful tool for long-term sustainable development, improving the economic opportunities for farmers and contributing to the health of all consumers.  Making open data work for agriculture and nutrition requires a shared agenda to increase the supply, quality, and interoperability of data, alongside action to build capacity for the use of data by all stakeholders.

The United States made several pledges at FfD including increasing support for global efforts to make agricultural and nutritionally relevant data available, accessible, and usable for unrestricted use worldwide.  As a cornerstone of this support, the United States will expand and deepen its commitment to the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative. This commitment will encourage collaboration and cooperation among existing agriculture and open data activities, without duplication, and will bring together stakeholders to solve long-standing global problems with a priority toward improving global food security. Specifically, the United States will provide $4 million in support of the GODAN Secretariat, matching the contribution provided by the United Kingdom.

When it comes to the U.S. Forest Service, it’s not always about trees.

Sometimes it’s all about the birds, the dragonflies and the butterflies. Oh, and the bats.  At least, that’s what it was all about during a ceremony last month recognizing some great contributions from U.S. Forest Service and partner organizations to the Wings Across the Americas program in the past year.

In a festive event held in Omaha, Nebraska, as part of the 80th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, U.S. Forest Service employees and agency partners received shout-outs for outstanding efforts supporting migratory species across the nation and beyond.

While many tuned in to watch the World Cup to see which team would become the globe’s soccer champs, others watched a competition of a different kind: one that named the earth’s best identifiers of slices of earth.

College students from the United States competed with teams from nine other countries to see who could best interpret soil. America took first and second in the inaugural International Soil Judging Contest. And American contest Tyler Witkowski also won second place overall of 45 contestants.

“Soil and land judging at the high school and college level is a baseline entry for young people to study the land and learn to read the landscape so that they can better manage and protect it,” said Maxine Levin, with the National Soil Survey Center of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.  NRCS is the United States’ premier private lands conservation agency, originally founded to conserve and map the nation’s soils. Levin helped prepare the contest and served as a judge.

Last year, the first International School Meals Day was held on March 8. It was a great success and brought teachers and students in both the United States and United Kingdom together to connect on one of the most critical issues facing the world today – child nutrition. This year, International School Meals Day will be held on March 6 and we’re looking for even more schools to participate.

The fact is that good nutrition and a healthy lifestyle are as important to a child’s overall success as the curriculum that our schools teach every day. Schools are essential to early nutrition education and helping young children build healthy habits that last a lifetime. That’s why I’m so proud that the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act set the wheels in motion for us to raise the standards for school meals in the U.S. This year’s theme for International School Meals Day is “Food Stories” which is a great topic to get kids talking about their favorite nutritious foods they enjoy at school and at home.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

Exciting times are ahead for the future of global agriculture, development, and health.  On October 31, the US delegation returned from successfully launching the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative at the Open Government Partnership Summit in London. GODAN, a partnership between the United States and the United Kingdom governments, focuses on opening agricultural and nutrition data. Working with over 50 partners, GODAN expects to keep the momentum rolling, welcoming additional partners to join the initiative before the first GODAN partner meeting.

On June 8^th, during the Nutrition for Growth event in London, the United Kingdom and United States governments announced plans to launch the Global Open Data Initiative for Agriculture and Nutrition.  This, in turn, built on the G-8 International Conference on Open Data for Agriculture conference in late April, where I witnessed a successful coming together of innovators sharing new ways to make agriculturally-relevant data accessible to users around the world.  That goal is gaining momentum, and I am pleased to see a global initiative being formed on this critical issue because we must work together to achieve a “data revolution” for agriculture.

But it will only be successful if others come forward to join us, and I hope others will join us as we use data as another tool to help produce and feed people with safe, nutritious food.

The U.S. Forest Service Green Team wants you to know that Green Office Week has arrived from across the Atlantic.

The first Green Office Week was launched in 2009 in Great Britain in response to research showing that United Kingdom employees felt they were being held back from being environmentally friendly at work because of a lack of empowerment and facilities.

The United Kingdom (UK) has long played an important role in U.S. agricultural exports. This history dates back to the completion of the Erie Canal in the early 1800s, which linked the Great Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard, significantly increasing the export of food, particularly Midwestern wheat, to England.

To this day, the United Kingdom offers tremendous opportunities for U.S. agriculture and the United States exports more than $1.6 billion annually in agricultural, fish and forestry products to the UK. Many of these products are showcased each year during USDA-endorsed trade shows, such as the International Food Exhibition (IFE), which took place in London in March.