In a speech today at Colorado State University’s Salazar Center’s Virtual International Symposium of Conservation Impact, United States Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced plans for funding $500 million to both African swine fever (ASF) prevention and relief from agricultural market disruption.
Secretary Vilsack shares how the Department of Agriculture, at President Biden’s discretion, intends to help agricultural America face the economic troubles posed by the pandemic and climate change.
Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) funding will be used as a tool to help the Dominican Republic and Haiti minimize the risk of spreading ASF.
“With this action, we intend to do everything we can to protect our trade, our economy, our pork industry and the jobs connected to it,” says Vilsack. “We’ll use these resources to support a robust expansion and coordination or monitoring, surveillance, prevention, quarantining and other activities to help eliminate risk while also shoring-up our efforts here in the US to prevent the disease from getting to the mainland.”
Secretary Vilsack says the goal is to keep producers on the farm rather than having to sell out.
“We’ll also tap the CCC to work with our traditional disaster programs to help farmers repair storm damage, reduce the high cost of feed, and pay down the high cost of transportation many livestock producers are now incurring to haul feed and water to their operations.
The CCC would also be at the center of a proposed Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry Partnership Initiative that Vilsack announced during the press conference. If advanced, the initiative would fund pilot project including farmers, ranchers and foresters that, “provide incentives to implement climate smart conservation practices on working lands and to quantify and monitor the carbon and greenhouse gas benefits associated with those practices.”
Data and learning from those pilots could support future development of new markets in which farmers and foresters could benefit financially in exchange for commodities produced while delivering ecosystem services.
“The pilots will invest in science, monitoring and verification to measure the benefits of these climate smart practices,” Vilsack explained.
According to Secretary Vilsack, the pandemic and climate-related events exposed our overall food system as highly consolidated and fragile by producing issues ranging from ship ports all the way to school lunchrooms.
“American producers are frustrated by the fact that empty container ships are leaving our ports while agricultural products sit on the dock, waiting to leave our shores,” says Vilsack. “While many school districts across the US are now being told that shortages exist in the food normally ordered for school meals.”
The USDA intends to answer port and public-school adversity with $1.5 billion in funding.
