Open agriculture and nutrition data is a powerful tool for long-term sustainable development. The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative - comprising more than 350 international organizations representing governments, donors, businesses, and not-for-profits - continues to be a leader in advocating for the adoption of open data policies. GODAN’s focus on opening agriculture and nutrition data as a mechanism to support sustainable development has the potential to solve longstanding global food security challenges.
As a founding partner of GODAN, the United States Government (USG) has implemented policy to support the creation of open data resources and provided technical support to make open data work for agriculture and nutrition—through the release of open data sets, through the development of standards that allow different types of data sets to be integrated with one another, and through the creation of new databases to house open data. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has served as the U.S. Government lead on the GODAN initiative since its creation in 2013, and has been highly involved in open data efforts.
Held on September 15-16, 2016 in New York City, the GODAN Summit was the largest open data event ever held for the agriculture and nutrition fields. As a member of the GODAN Summit Planning Committee, the USG led the planning of a wide range of activities designed to stimulate high-level dialog around the importance of open data, including: addresses from Secretary Vilsack and other Ministers, diverse presentations and exhibits from open data practitioners, an Open Data Challenge competition, and a data hackathon. During the Summit, a GODAN petition was delivered to high-level policymakers and diverse stakeholders, representing voices from around the world united together calling for continued support of open data in the fields of agriculture and nutrition. USDA also brought together GODAN partners from over 20 organizations to establish two GODAN Working Groups, driving important sessions around the fields of nutrition and precision agriculture practices at the Summit.
In addition to leading high-level policy conversations around the importance of open data at the Summit, the USDA has worked with colleagues across the Federal government to secure new open data commitments within the agriculture and nutrition fields. These open data efforts, as well as those continuously uploaded within the consolidated Federal catalog at www.data.gov, are a testament to the U.S. commitment to make agriculture and nutrition data available, accessible, and usable for unrestricted use worldwide. By building capacity for the use of “big data” by all stakeholders, we can stimulate economic growth and support the farmers, scientists, consumers, and entrepreneurs who are working to solve the world’s long-term food security needs.