USDA Funding Freeze Will Close Soybean Innovation Lab At UI Champaign-Urbana
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an island in a sea of farmland where corn and soybeans grow, sits the Soybean Innovation Lab. The institution, part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future initiative, helps advance soybean production in sub-Saharan Africa, assisting farmers there and developing markets for soybean farmers in the United States. And it’s scheduled to close in April.
The lab has created communications tools for growers and infrastructure for soybean processing since it opened in 2013, helping the market grow fourfold over that time. Now it’s one of many USAID-funded programs scheduled to shutter as the result of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order freezing foreign aid.
“We were absolutely moving the needle,” said lab director and principal investigator Peter Goldberg, noting that work done by the lab resulted in higher yields that improved opportunities for African farmers. Now, he said, “We’re done.”
Soybeans provide both cooking oil and protein in the form of animal feed. In Africa, where the population and many countries’ economies are booming, there’s the potential for a bigger soybean market that incorporates rural African farmers, helps alleviate malnutrition and opens doors for U.S. growers to participate, said economist Alex Winter-Nelson, a professor emeritus at the university. It could also help reduce dependence in Africa on imported palm oil, which is often associated with deforestation.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19032025/usaid-soybean-innovation-lab-to-close-after-trump-cuts/
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