Abandoned Crops, Fired Scientists: Agricultural Research Hit by U.S. Foreign Aid Freeze

By Dan Charles and Erik Stokstad

Researchers at Peru’s National Agrarian University La Molina have spent years developing a fast-growing cultivar of passion fruit and introducing it to farmers in the north of the country. The U.S.-funded effort, called PERU-Hub, is intended to diversify agricultural options in an area once known for cocaine production. But the project’s staff stopped getting paid in late January after President Donald Trump’s administration ordered that most work funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be shut down. A federal judge issued a temporary injunction yesterday ordering USAID to honor existing funding commitments for now, but the future of this project—and many others like it around the world—remains uncertain.

USAID is known by many for its work in global health and famine relief. But the agency has also spent considerable sums on agricultural research intended to reduce poverty, hunger, and malnutrition, and the January funding freeze sent shock waves that hit agricultural scientists around the world. Workers stopped collecting data in test plots of sorghum, peanuts, and other crops at experimental stations in Africa. Payments ceased to small companies that produce seeds for crop trials. And research coordinators at more than a dozen U.S. universities stopped work, laid off staff, and even ceased communicating with global partners.

Receiving the stop work order felt “unreal,” says David Tschirley, an agricultural economist at Michigan State University who studies policy and chairs a council of USAID-funded researchers. Project leaders are now “trying to figure out” which activities could resume in light of the court injunction, he says.

USAID funds agricultural research through multiple pathways. The agency is the single largest donor to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a global nonprofit that runs a network of scientific centers. It also funds research through the Feed the Future Innovation Labs, an effort that’s led by researchers at 13 U.S. universities.

Some of the university labs help develop locally suitable varieties of crops such as soybean and tomatoes, as well as fish and poultry. Other labs focus on irrigation efficiency, technical training for farmers, and developing markets for new crops. The labs—funding for which was authorized by the Global Food Security Act of 2016, signed by Trump—have received more than $60 million in federal contracts annually from USAID to support research in the United States and 40 other countries.

When USAID issued a series of stop work orders in late January, the universities had no choice but to lay off workers. Peter Goldsmith, an agricultural economist and head of the Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says he held a “very tearful” meeting earlier this week, where he laid off 30 scientists and other Illinois-based staff. It’s not clear whether they will be rehired.

Similar layoffs happened abroad. Timothy Dalton, director of the innovation lab at Kansas State University, says his group had to stop paying workers who tend research plots of sorghum and millet in Ethiopia, Niger, and Senegal. Trials of peanut varieties that the University of Georgia set up in Malawi met a similar fate, according to a researcher who’s familiar with the work there. “It’s kind of bonkers. The amount of money it took to get those varieties in the ground is a lot more than just the pennies for labor to keep them going and collect the data,” they said.

Stop work orders also shut down several studies of human nutrition after researchers had recruited participants and begun to collect data about their diets and health. The studies included one on ways to improve access to more nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables in Nepal. “These are projects that have such immense value,” said Shibani Ghosh, associate director of the innovation lab on nutrition at Tufts University, which funded the work through its USAID contract.

Several researchers who work on USAID-sponsored projects declined to speak to Science for this story. “Everybody’s on edge, and they’re fearful of retribution,” said a scientist who didn’t want to be named. Some feared that publicly criticizing the funding situation could make them, or their universities, a target of future cuts.