Food for Progress

As a daughter of farmers, and as someone who has spent her career working on behalf of farmers, one of the things I care most deeply about is the future of agriculture – both in the United States and around the world. That is why one of my highest priorities at USDA has been to help develop the next...

We don’t spend much time thinking about roads in the United States. We worry about the traffic on them, but we don’t often consider the importance of the actual road itself. But to the Senegalese villages of Sindone, Yabon and Laty, a new road represents a path to a more prosperous life. A new 7.5...

On a recent trip to Africa, I spent time in Ethiopia witnessing how USDA’s work there is helping the country’s agricultural sector to grow and thrive, especially for women farmers. I visited a small-scale, woman-owned dairy farm near the town of Mojo, about 50 miles south of Addis Ababa, to see how...

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack met with Haiti’s Minister of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development, Thomas Jacques, today to emphasize USDA’s ongoing commitment to help the Haitian agricultural sector recover from the devastating impact of the 2010 earthquake.

USDA’s food assistance and development programs serve a dual purpose: to meet the immediate needs of hungry people, and to show their countries how to rejuvenate their agricultural sectors and increase their capacity to trade. We accomplish these goals in cooperation with other U.S. government...

A partnership between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Land O’Lakes International Development has helped revive a Mozambique dairy farming tradition and raised small-scale farmers’ monthly incomes by an average of 225 percent.

A recent Food for Progress (FFP) project in Bangladesh shows how a small effort can have a big impact on a community. The Rural Enterprise for Alleviating Poverty project is managed by Winrock International with the help of USDA and the Ministry of Fisheries in Bangladesh. The goal of this project...

By John Brewer, Foreign Agricultural Service Administrator As our group sat near the strawberry fields, in Jutiapa, Honduras, it was hard not to be impressed with the positive outcomes stemming from a USDA grant in 2006. On Tuesday, June 29, I inaugurated the “Biotechnology and Food Security”...