USDA--Year at a Glance

Here is a brief rundown of some key USDA accomplishments in 1997:

Increased Production, Trade, and Opportunities for Family Farmers

• Helped ensure that U.S. agricultural exports reached $57.3 billion, the second highest ever. New markets for U.S. agricultural products were opened around the world, including rice to Honduras, pork to Venezuela, grapes to China, and tomatoes to Japan. The export surplus remained a robust $21.5 billion.
• Worked with farmers to ensure strong harvests in 1997. The wheat crop, featuring record yields in winter wheat, was the largest overall wheat crop of the 1990's. The corn crop was the third largest ever, and soybean yields were at a record high.
• Enrolled 17 million acres of America’s most environmentally sensitive lands for protection in the CRP.
• Extended the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) to build on Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) efforts and combine them with the goals and funding of State governments.
• Provided direct operating and farm ownership loans totaling $233 million to 4,247 beginning farmers--a 20-percent increase over fiscal year (FY) 1996.
• Responded to natural disasters, including blizzards, droughts, flooding, and tornadoes, with emergency relief and funding.
• Approved expansion of Crop Revenue Coverage (CRC), a privately developed revenue insurance product, for corn, cotton, grain sorghum, and wheat. CRC is now available on almost 90 percent of the corn, wheat, cotton, soybean, and grain sorghum acres in the United States.

Provided More Tools for the Wise Stewardship of the Land

• Accepted over 23,000 contracts, totaling $171 million, providing cost-share assistance for conservation enhancements as part of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program.
• Announced the new National Conservation Buffer Initiative to help landowners install 2 million miles of conservation buffers by the year 2002.
• Sponsored the Lake Tahoe Summit to improve Federal, State, and tribal agencies’ ability to coordinate programs that protect the environment.

Fed More Children and Families and Made Food Recovery a National Priority

• Hosted the first National Food Recovery and Gleaning Summit to bring together public interest groups, the private sector, farmers, and others to discuss hunger and food recovery. Summit participants set a national goal of increasing food recovery by 33 percent.
• Reached full funding for WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children), assisting 7.5 million mothers and their young children with healthful food and nutrition advice.
• Obtained rebates for WIC State agencies on infant formula through cooperative bidding, permitting 1.6 million additional participants and $1.2 billion in savings.

Proposed Food Safety Regulations That Will Better Protect the Public Health

• Required all federally inspected meat and poultry processing plants to implement the first two elements of the new Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point inspection system to reduce human exposure to meat- and poultry-borne pathogens.
• Promoted efforts to address food safety risks on the farm and during transportation and distribution.
• Intensified research efforts into foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella and E. coli.
• Developed a mixture of microorganisms that, when added to feed for young chickens, prevent Salmonella from thriving. This technology, called competitive exclusion, represents another important tool to assure a safe food supply for U.S. and export markets.
• Unveiled “Fight BAC,” a new national food safety education campaign developed and supported by a public-private partnership of industry, government, and consumer groups.
• Proposed Food Safety legislation that would authorize civil penalties for violations rather than relying on closing plants.

Created Jobs and Economic Revitalization in Rural Communities

• Provided more than $2.6 billion in loans, loan guarantees, or grants in rural housing and issued rental assistance to 40,000 rural, low-income households.
• Financed the start-up or expansion of 1,183 rural businesses or cooperatives, creating or preserving more than 53,000 jobs.
• Provided more than $1.3 billion in loans and grants for 1,125 rural water or wastewater projects that serve 8.5 million people.
• Made a down payment on an information superhighway for rural America by loaning $380 million for 79 rural telecommunications projects providing service to 211,000 rural households and businesses, to make advanced telecommunications services such as the Internet available to more rural families.
• Provided almost $17 million in loans and grants for distance learning and telemedicine projects, to expand educational and medical opportunities to America’s rural communities.
• Invested more than $60 million in the Nation’s 3 rural Empowerment Zones and 33 rural Enterprise Communities (EZ/EC), creating or saving over 7,000 jobs. More than 700,000 rural citizens now receive additional services in the EZ/EC’s as a result of USDA loans, grants, and programs.

Invested in the Future Through Research, Education, and Economics

• Developed highly specific and sensitive antibodies for detecting E. coli. New commercial diagnostic tests based upon this technology detect the E. coli of greatest concern--the pathogenic 0157:H7 serotype that can be fatal. Previous tests for identifying E. coli 0157:H7 and related pathogens were generally regarded as lacking adequate specificity.
• Built a machine that kills Salmonella on raw poultry surfaces, where Salmonella contamination of raw poultry is most likely to be found.
• Estimated food losses by retailers, food service establishments, and consumers at 96 billion pounds or 26 percent of the edible food supply.
• Awarded more than $1.4 million in grants to 13 Hispanic-serving institutions for programs to attract and retain students to work in the Nation's food and agricultural scientific and professional workforce.
• Made almost $2 million in grant awards to 29 tribal colleges under the new Tribal Colleges Extension Program. The awards will support training and education in a wide variety of areas, including production agriculture, business management, community and family development, 4-H and youth leadership, natural resources and conservation, nutrition, diet, and health.
• Analyzed the effects of climate change and the possible implications of climate change mitigation policies. These analyses showed that there is considerable ability for the agricultural sector to adapt to climate change.
• Released 59 new varieties and 89 new germplasm lines of agricultural and horticultural crops for use by farmers, ranchers, and home gardeners. These new varieties and germplasm lines will aid in increasing U.S. agriculture’s worldwide competitiveness.

Promoted Quality and Fair Trade Through Marketing and Regulatory Services

• Proposed the first Federal regulations governing national organic agriculture standards. These rules strengthen one of the fastest growing segments of the agriculture economy, and will expand market opportunities for small and medium-sized farmers.
• Worked quickly to control newly established pests such as the Asian longhorned beetle and Karnal bunt, and to reduce the incidence of animal diseases such as brucellosis and tuberculosis.
• Hosted 10 farmers markets with vendors from 7 States at USDA in Washington, DC, and helped establish another 23 farmers markets in coordination with the U.S. Departments of Energy, Transportation, and Labor.
• Awarded 47 percent of Agricultural Marketing Service purchase awards to small business firms (of the $285 million obligated for Federal meat and fish purchases), exceeding the Government’s goal of 20 percent.
• Resolved unjustified trade barriers with 16 countries. These efforts were worth $7 billion in agricultural exports.
• Prompted the Surface Transportation Board to take unprecedented emergency action to alleviate problems of agricultural shippers.
• Pilot-tested a project to find ways for farmers to sell directly to school districts in Georgia; these direct sales methods emphasized small and limited-resource farmers’ access to direct sales outlets.
• Proposed regulatory reform for milk marketing orders.

Set a Sweeping Civil Rights Agenda for the Department

As indicators of Secretary Glickman’s commitment to eradicating the vestiges of discrimination at USDA and ensuring equal opportunity for all, USDA achieved the following civil rights accomplishments in 1997:

• Restaffed the civil rights enforcement unit and began work on the backlog of discrimination complaints--resolving 187 program discrimination complaints, including 11 major settlements.
• Initiated new foreclosure and lending policies at USDA to help assure that no one will lose his or her farm because of discrimination.
• Provided direct operating loans totaling $65 million to 1,927 socially disadvantaged farmers and direct farm ownership loans totaling $15.5 million to 184 socially disadvantaged farmers, exceeding by 176 percent the targeted allocation that Congress had set.
• Increased minority representation on Farm Service Agency (FSA) State committees by 10 percent over the past year--46 percent of the 222 FSA State committee members are now women and minorities.
• Established an Office of Outreach to reach customers that USDA has not traditionally served.
• Provided $4.5 million from the Fund for Rural America for outreach to socially disadvantaged farmers.
• Created the Small Farms Commission to address the critical needs of small and socially disadvantaged farmers.
• Increased direct farm ownership and farm operating loans made to minority and women farmers from $46.5 million to $81 million (a 74-percent increase), between FY 1993 and FY 1997.
• Established the new division of civil rights in the Office of the General Counsel. This office is charged with providing legal counsel and guidance to the Department on civil rights issues.
• Hosted two procurement conferences targeting American Indian and Alaska Native Corporations, resulting in an increase in contract awards to American Indian firms.

Provided Administrative and Executive Support to the Department

• Developed regulations and initiated a Welfare-to-Work Program, for taking people off the welfare rolls and putting them on USDA’s employment rolls. Exceeding the Departmental goal of 100, USDA hired 126 employees under this program in FY 1997.
• Established a Nursing Mothers Room, to provide employees who are nursing mothers the privacy to express their breast milk at work, and thus allow them to return to work earlier after delivery.
• Successfully bid against other Federal and private data processing centers to provide data processing for the Federal Aviation Administration.
• Established a Department-level Year 2000 (Y2K) Project Team to ensure that the Department’s hundreds of information systems will be capable of handling the challenge of the year 2000 date change.
• Appointed the first Chief Information Officer for USDA. The Office of the Chief Information Officer oversees the design, acquisition, maintenance, use, and disposal of information technology by USDA agencies, and monitors the performance of the Department’s information technology programs.