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Spring 2023 Newsletter

CALS Global News

2022 Grant awards to CALS Global - $80.1 million

In February 2022, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA-NRCS) released a call for proposals for the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. The announcement promoted a US$1 billion program to fund pilot projects that assist producers and landowners to:

  • implement climate-smart production practices, activities, and systems
  • measure/quantify, monitor and verify carbon and greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits
  • develop markets and promote the resulting climate-smart commodities.

CALS Global was approached by Rural Investment to Protect our Environment (RIPE) to contribute to their planned proposal and subsequently lead the RIPE Partnership with a consortium of 15 partner organizations.

The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities call received over 1,000 applications for two rounds of funding. On September 14, 2022, Secretary Vilsack announced USDA would be increasing the investment up to $2.8 billion for 70 selected projects under the first pool of funding. Our proposal was among the top tier of 14 projects with an award of $80 million dollars for the RIPE Partnership.

The grant, which is the largest in the university’s history, will create a three-year pilot program in Virginia, Arkansas, Minnesota, and North Dakota reaching over 4500 operations. Virginia Tech will distribute $56 million directly to producers to help them implement climate-smart agricultural practices for crop and animal production. A complete list of projects is available at  https://www.usda.gov/climate-solutions/climate-smart-commodities/projects.

In addition to the $80 million USDA-NRCS award, CALS Global has recently received awards of $75,000 from USDA-FAS and $25,000 from USDA-NIFA. 

CALS Global’s 2022 Event Circuit

With a view to expanding global reach, the CALS Global team participated in several international events in 2022 to find new venues to engage with researchers, industry, and practitioners in agriculture and the life sciences. Sponsorship and attendance at these events initiated more than a dozen new partnerships, identified potential sponsors for research, established connections with policy makers and investors, and increased awareness and attention of the Global Agricultural Productivity (GAP) Report(R).

Events attended and/or sponsored included:

We will be attending most of these events again in 2023 to continue to build high-value partnerships and relationships, to create opportunities for our faculty and students and to ensure that the research and work done within CALS can create demonstrable impact on some of the most challenging issues the world is currently facing.

 

Partnering in Specialized PhD Fellowships for African Scholars

African governments in collaboration with the World Bank are running a Regional Scholarship and Innovation Fund (RSIF), a flagship program of the Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology (PASET), which is the continent’s first pan-African science fund. The program champions for a critical mass of highly skilled future science leaders by fostering collaborations for research excellence and PhD acquisition by Africa’s aspiring researchers. The program hosts over 200 PhD fellows in 15 African universities including Africa Centers of Excellence in Makerere University (Uganda) and the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (Tanzania) which have an active working relationship with CALS Global.

For holistic training and to benefit from partner support, the RSIF-PASET program collaborates with regional (African) and international partner institutions (IPIs) such as Virginia Tech for research fellowships. The partner institutions host as visiting fellows for short-term visits (upto 12 months for Virginia Tech) for specialized research and networking.

Currently, Virginia Tech hosts 3 fellows, Ivy Okello (a Kenyan entomologist studying in Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania), Isidire Nsangimana (a Rwandan entomologist studying in Sokione University of Agriculture, Tanzania), and Charlie Amoia (a Cote d’Ivorian virologist studying at Sokoine University of Agriculture). Both Ivy and Isidore are hosted at the Eastwood Lab, working with Dr. Gillian Eastwood (also a 2019 Global Opportunity Initiative alumni) while Charlie works with Dr. James Weger at the Weger lab. The students have received commendable and tremendous support from Dr. Eastwood and Dr. Weger and their colleagues and we acknowledge their mentorship. CALS Global is currently processing additional request from other fellows interested in visiting Virginia Tech for the fellowship.

Look out for the visiting fellows’ testimonials in next CALS Global newsletter.

Global Agricultural Productivity Report (GAP Report)

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    Alarming new data shows fragility of agricultural systems, global inability to sustainably feed a growing population
    Alarming new data shows fragility of agricultural systems, global inability to sustainably feed a growing population , redirect

    Global agricultural productivity growth is in steep decline and current efforts to expand sustainable agriculture production to feed a swelling global population are inadequate to deal with the challenges that the world faces, according to the 2022 Global Agricultural Productivity Report (GAP Report) that was released on Oct. 4 at an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

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    Consultative discourse on Accelerating Agricultural Productivity in East Africa
    Consultative discourse on Accelerating Agricultural Productivity in East Africa

    The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) Global Programs successfully organized and held an event on accelerating agricultural productivity growth in East Africa. The multi-stakeholder event, held on June 23, 2022 in Nairobi, discussed the regional food and nutrition status and proposed recommendations to help address declining agricultural productivity in the East African Region. While advocating for increased agricultural productivity, Dr. Tom Thompson (Associate Dean and CALS Global Director) highlighted the VT Global Agricultural Productivity (GAP) Initiative’s targeted global research and collaboration agenda.

Student News

CALS Students Participate in Experiential Learning with World Food Programme Cambodia

During the Fall 2022 semester, five CALS students participated in an experiential learning project with World Food Programme (WFP) Cambodia. Through a new partnership with the country office, two projects were conducted to assist WFP in their efforts to support rice fortification in Cambodia. The projects were led by CALS Global associate director, Jessica Agnew, and the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics assistant professor, Anubhab Gupta. They included creating a commercialization strategy for fortified rice and developing a framework for analyzing the economic impact of fortified rice in Cambodia.

In October 2022, Natasha Iannuzzi, Jake Ver Beek, Teresa Thornton, Alex Macri, and Yoonjung Lee traveled with Agnew to Phnom Penh to meet with WFP staff, government officials, private sector millers and sellers of rice, and schools that serve fortified rice in their meal programs. The students collected information on potential opportunities to initiate commercialization of rice fortification, learned about the government’s priorities on nutrition and human wellbeing in the country, and spent time understanding more about WFP’s fortification and behavior change initiatives. The team also supported the execution of a workshop with more than 30 government officials to discuss the economic impact analysis framework and to better understand the challenges that will be faced in scaling up rice fortification.

 

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    Faculty members go the extra mile to give students extraordinary study abroad experiences
    Faculty members go the extra mile to give students extraordinary study abroad experiences , redirect

    Jessica Agnew, associate director of CALS Global led a graduate student and four undergraduates on a trip to Cambodia to meet with representatives from the World Food Programme and lay the groundwork for a study on the impact of introducing fortified rice in the country. They examined how the rice could be marketed and assessed what economic gains the country might see if the fortification could be done on a national scale.

Faculty Spotlight

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    International collaboration and outreach: GOI in East Africa
    International collaboration and outreach: GOI in East Africa

    As part of the Global Opportunity Initiative (GOI), the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) in conjunction with the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine successfully ran an international collaboration and outreach summer visit to Kenya and Uganda. The objective of this year’s GOI visit was to understand Kenyan agri-food systems from a non-academic lens. A team of three GOI fellows - Dr. Natalie Cook, Dr. Tessa Lecuyer, and John Ignosh - three CALS Global staff (Dr. Tom Thompson, Dr. Jessica Agnew, and Dickson Otieno), and VCE’s Ben Grove visited and engaged in discussions with key partners.

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    Anubhab Gupta headshot
    Fall 2022 CALS Global Scholar, Anubhab Gupta, to Conduct Research for World Food Programme Cambodia

    Dr. Anubhab Gupta, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has been named the Fall 2022 CALS Global Scholar. This semester, the Global Scholar award will be used to build connections with the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the World Food Programme, to support the research needs of the Cambodia Country Office. As the CALS Global Scholar, Gupta will work with WFP Cambodia to understand the economic impact of rice fortification and help construct a framework to analyze the economic costs and benefits of rice fortification. PhD candidate Yoonjung Lee will work with Dr. Gupta on this research project.

Small grant awards to CALS faculty in fall 2022:

  • Renee Eaton (HNFE) and Brian Wiersma (FST)--visit to Steger Center, Switzerland to plan semester abroad program
  • Igor Sharakhov (ENTO), travel to England for collaboration activities
  • Leighton Reed (SPES), travel to Madagascar for collaboration activities
  • Gillian Eastwood (ENTO), travel to Panama for collaboration activities
  • Emmanuel Torres Quezada (ESAREC),  travel to Japan for collaboration activities
  • Amanda Stewart (FST), travel to Trinidad for collaboration activities 
  • Jactone Ogejo (BSE), travel to Kenya for collaboration activities
  • Shelly Rhoads (SAS), travel to Ireland for collaboration activities
  • Ed Smith (SAS), travel to Liberia to prepare for proposal submission
  • John Ignosh (VCE/BSE), Leigh Anne Krometis (BSE), Venkataramana Sridhar (BSE), travel to Guatemala for collaboration activities