Food Security Researchers in 20 Countries Thought They Had U.S. Funding. Then Trump Took Office

The Trump Administration has officially terminated funding for most of the Feed the Future Innovation Labs, a global food security initiative established during former President Obama’s tenure and anchored in 17 laboratories in U.S. universities and a network of international partners. Sentient confirmed this with nine U.S. laboratory directors who received letters in late February, terminating millions of dollars in funding for grants that were already contracted, “pursuant to a directive from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.” The letters claim that this Obama-era initiative, aiming to alleviate food insecurity in the poorest regions of the world with research aimed at, among other things, making crops like rice, cowpeas and vegetables more climate-resilient, is “not in the national interest.”

The official U.S. government website (www.feedthefuture.gov) for Feed the Future has been scrubbed from the internet, resulting in a “404 Not Found” notice. In January, this website boasted of the initiative’s self-reported accomplishments: alleviating the hunger of around 5.2 million families, lifting an estimated 5.7 million people out of poverty and deploying over 1,000 agricultural innovations, according to an archive of the website. The initiative was established in 2010 by the Obama Administration in response to the dramatic spike in global food prices between 2007 and 2008.

According to a list of the thousands of terminated USAID contracts, obtained by Punchbowl News, all but one of the 17 Feed the Future Innovation Labs have been officially canceled.

Prior to this, the research laboratories were under a 90-day stop-work order prompted by the Trump Administration’s Jan. 20 executive order, which froze foreign assistance programs largely administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This abruptly caused some of the USAID-funded innovation labs to fire staff and upending global agricultural projects — even before most labs were officially terminated.

Some of the innovation lab researchers tell Sentient that the universities’ leadership were working to stretch budgets to retain staff. One researcher pleaded with its partner organization in Cambodia to hold off on laying off staff, hoping that they’d be spared in the Trump Administration’s review process. The official termination notices dashed the last hope that funding would be revived.

“We were thinking that we would be reviewed and then either asked to revise or modify [the lab] to support the current administrative agenda,” Vara Prasad, a plant physiologist and the director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Climate Resilient Sustainable Intensification (CRSI) at Kansas State University, tells Sentient. “We were willing to respond to the new agenda.” This newly launched lab was supported with up to $50 million from USAID for five years.

Shortly after the funding freeze, Prasad traveled to Cambodia to meet with the president of the Royal University of Agriculture — an international partner and Feed the Future grantee — to implore him to delay letting go of 32 staff and 14 students who were promised funding through 2026. “Hey, don’t dismantle yet. It’s just a pause. We might come back,” he recalls telling the president, who agreed to stretch the university’s existing funds. Kansas State University also agreed to hold onto the 11-person team in the U.S. until they gained clarity about the lab’s future.

This clarity came earlier than Prasad anticipated: on February 27, when he received the official notice that his lab was being terminated, just a month into the 90-day review.

In early March, Prasad was still gathering the strength to call his international partners in Cambodia and elsewhere — who were notified by e-mail of the lab’s termination — to discuss the abrupt end to the research collaborations.

“I didn’t have energy or the guts to call them and talk face-to-face. Unfortunately, I didn’t gather that courage. But I have to do it,” says Prasad.

The CRSI lab was poised to work with farmers and universities across parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and Central America to support climate-adapted agricultural systems, including partnering with Cambodia’s Royal University of Agriculture (RUA) to build the country’s agricultural extension system to provide farmers with resources to withstand a future of climate-induced flooding, drought and pests. This would extend a decade-long partnership between RUA and the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sustainable Intensification (SIIL), led by Prasad between 2014 and 2024, which involved working with women farmers in Cambodia who tend small commercial gardens near their homes.

“In Cambodia, there is a feminization of agriculture happening because [many] of the men are moving to Thailand and Vietnam for jobs,” says Prasad. “So we wanted to make sure that women have the resources to grow these commercial vegetable gardens.”

The SIIL lab supported collectives of women farmers by building cold storage facilities to extend the life of their produce, installing solar-powered drip irrigation to improve water efficiency, providing them with tuk-tuks (3-wheeled vehicles) to travel to the market and grafting tomatoes to resist pests — under funding that was set to continue through 2026 under a SIIL grant and then expanded under the CRSI lab with a larger emphasis on climate.

The Collapse of a Global Agricultural Research Network

The official termination notices, delivered between February 25 and 28, coincided with the Trump Administration’s sweeping termination of nearly all USAID programs. The U.S. universities are the direct recipients of the USAID award money, which then supports a wide network of sub-recipients — international universities and other research partners — concentrated in 20 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. With an annual budget of around $1 billion, appropriated by Congress, the Feed the Future initiative was a major funder of global agricultural research, enabling transnational collaborations.

In 2021, the global initiative provided 42,096 people with short-term training and 408 individuals with graduate school training over the course of the year, according to the Association of Public & Land Grant Universities.

“It goes beyond the innovation labs. The entire global research community is going to be affected really hard. The international community on food crops — that’s going to be hit extremely hard,” says Bob Zeigler, a plant pathologist who focuses on rice and is an advisor to one of the Feed the Future labs.

“The U.S. government is stiffing Kansas State University,” says Zeigler. This, in turn, has led Kansas State University to stiff its partner institutions across the world, without any notice to smoothly off-ramp research projects and staff. “We have to be deadbeats too.”

The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Climate Resilient Cereals (CRCIL) at Kansas State University is the only lab that has yet to receive a termination notice, according to the lab’s director and the list of terminated awards. However, this lab is still under a funding freeze. The lab was awarded a $22 million grant through USAID in 2023, which it then distributed to partner institutions in Senegal, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and the U.S. to research climate-adapted wheat, sorghum, rice, millet — until this funding was abruptly cut off.

The lab’s loss of funding also disrupted its international partners, including in Senegal.

“This is a tremendous slow-down on our breeding programs,” says Khalil Kane, a molecular biochemist at the Senegalese Institute of Agricultural Research (ISRA) at the regional center of excellence for drought adaptation (CERAAS). “More than 50 percent of the budget of the research we’re using in CERAAS is financed by the Feed the Future Innovation labs. So of course, it is a major impact on our research,” which is primarily focused on identifying the genetic basis for drought tolerance in staple crops to develop new varieties.

In particular, Kane says the partnership with CRCIL helped “improve the understanding of the genetic architecture of environmental adaptation in germplasm to heat and drought conditions in Senegal and Ethiopia” for staple grains. He notes that the lab currently has an ongoing trial in the field for heat-resistant wheat in Senegal, which imports around 800,000 tons of wheat per year because it historically has failed to grow in the region’s tropical climate. While this research will still continue without CRCIL, they’ll need to quickly scale back.

“Some people will lose their jobs, for sure,” he says, adding that the institute is looking into how to fulfill their financial obligations in the absence of CRCIL funding. “We have to find ways to pay the people we have contracted to work in this program.”

Other research institutions are scrambling to figure out contingency plans so students can finish their degrees. Prasad says that he plans to discuss with Kansas State University’s deans and its president the options for still funding around 14 students in Cambodia, whose undergraduate degrees and master’s thesis projects are supported by the SIIL lab. “If they don’t write the thesis, they cannot graduate,” says Prasad. “We’ll have to find resources because we can’t leave the students in limbo,” he says, in reference to the Cambodian students. Others are not so fortunate.

The most catastrophic impacts to this funding shortfall will likely be felt in Haiti, a country that is suffering from some of the highest levels of hunger in the world.

The SIIL lab was also still supporting around 120 undergraduate and 30 masters students in Haiti, which Prasad does not foresee any way of salvaging. “I gave up on Haiti because it’s way too many students,” he says. Without this funding, the students will lose not only an educational opportunity, but a critical source of income.

For many students in Haiti, Prasad says, “this is the only [income] source for their entire family,” as many of the students’ parents are unemployed. “This was the lifeline for many of them, and this is also engaging the youth in the right way, in a productive fashion.” Without this funding, he is concerned that the students may be more susceptible to being recruited into what he refers to as “anti-social elements” as a means of survival.

Disappearing Agriculture, Climate and Crop Science Research 

Some innovation labs were unable to find alternative funding sources after the stop-work order in late January, forcing the abrupt end to these global research projects and entire institutions even before the official terminations in late February. For instance, the Feed the Future Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) at the University of Illinois laid off its entire team of 31 staff and contractors shortly after Trump’s executive order, according to the lab’s director Peter Goldsmith. The lab’s researchers are now searching for new work.

“When I received the notice that SIL would be gone and I had no work, it was pretty shocking, and we were not expecting that,” says Julia Nunes Paniago Pereira, who was a program coordinator at SIL. “We were everybody together in the room. There was a lot of crying.” The news was delivered in person by Goldsmith to the U.S. team after funding shut off.

The lab was in the process of developing soybeans for Sub-Saharan Africa that will now likely never reach farmers. “We had 45 new varieties in the pipeline for release…dead stop,” says Goldsmith. Another researcher at the lab had just designed a combine that could both thresh and cut the soybean, which an African firm was interested in developing to improve the efficiency of the region’s soybean farm production.

“It will never be manufactured in Africa. It’s just an idea on a drafting table,” says Goldsmith.

Across the world, other research projects will also remain ideas on drafting tables or unfinished collections of data. For instance, researchers in Ghana were forced to abandon a study into drought management practices as it was nearly finished.

“All of a sudden, a stop-work order came. So definitely, we were unprepared,” says Emmanuel Abokyi, a senior lecturer and researcher specializing in food security at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration.

Abokyi nearing the end of conducting an evaluation of the “One Village, One Dam” policy, one of Ghana’s government programs to build dams in villages to improve water access during the dry season, with the support of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk & Resilience at UC Davis. His hope was that nonprofits, the government and other institutions would “be able to use our research to guide how they want to deploy food security related interventions to these farmers.”

“That research was at the tail-end of it,” says Abokyi. “It was cut short abruptly, so we couldn’t finish that.” While his job is through the university, other colleagues who were fully supported by Feed the Future abruptly lost their jobs without notice.

The Feed the Future Innovation Lab focused on climate resilient cereal was on the cusp of developing rice that could be fully emerged in water in partnership with researchers in Bangladesh, where heavy monsoons and flooding routinely destroy fields of rice. When they received a work-stop order in late January, they were forced to halt this research. The lab has not yet received an official termination notice, making it unclear if the funding of this research will resume.

“The problem we have in much of the world where rice has grown is that if you put a regular rice seed out in the field and you get a sudden rain and the seed is covered up with water,” says Zeigler., an advisor to the lab. “The rice seed dies. It drowns. It can’t germinate.” Even though rice grows naturally in standing water, it can’t be submerged for extended periods of time.

He says that the lab had developed rice that could be completely submerged for two weeks, but now it’s unclear if this research will ever make it into the hands of farmers.

Zeigler suspects that this research is not profitable enough to gain the interest of private industry to develop to its completion. “The development of individual traits is typically not something that a company will do. The return on their investment, at least how people on Wall Street look at it, is not good enough to justify that investment,” says Zeigler.

 “But for society, the return on investment is extremely high,” added Zeigler. “If we look at the overall impact on food production and health, it’s well worth the investment.”

The Benefits to U.S. Agriculture

While the Trump Administration terminated the Feed the Future labs for not being in “the national interest,” the initiative explicitly aims to benefit U.S. interests and farmers. Like all USAID programs, the research is also a diplomatic tool with political objectives, including the goal of assisting “U.S. commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade.”

“When we work in these countries, we build a relationship with their governments. We build relationships with their research entities, we build relationships with their private sector,” says Prasad. “We can open up new markets and help our farmers. It’s a soft power, right?”  He notes how the research into heat-resistant wheat will also be used to benefit farmers in Kansas who have been struggling to grow wheat under hotter, dryer, windier conditions.

“The major issue that we have in Kansas when it comes to wheat production is extreme high temperature events during the maturity of the crop,” says Prasad. “So we were doing a lot of work on screening genotypes, wild germplasms of wheat, for high temperature heat tolerance” — research that is aimed at benefiting both countries’ farmers as they experience drier and hotter climates, which is becoming more common across a larger and larger swath of the world as climate change deepens.

As for now, it’s unclear if anyone will benefit from this research. Prasad is still figuring out how to make amends, pick up the pieces and press forward.

“It’s difficult because this type of research takes years to work,” he says. “To suddenly stop now to recoup and then to get back onto the race is going to be difficult.”

Clarification: This piece has been updated to clarify research on climate-resilience.