Chef Sachin Subbaiah of India prepares a salad during a live cooking demonstration at SPAR Hypermarket in Bangalore, India, as part of the U.S. Food and Beverage Independence Festival. The festival was the first multi-retailer U.S. food and beverage promotional campaign held throughout cities in India from June 29 to July 22.

While many Americans enjoyed time with family and friends grilling and preparing their favorite foods this past Independence Day, Indian consumers were learning about some of those same U.S. foods during a month-long promotional campaign. Read more »

Louis Guy Michael, the "Father of FAS."

The concept of ensuring access to foreign markets for U.S. agricultural products dates nearly to the founding of the Republic, when Thomas Jefferson was posted to Paris to, in his own words, ensure “the receipt of our whale-oils, salted fish, and salted meats, on favorable terms; the admission of our rice on equal terms with that of Piedmont, Egypt and the Levant; a mitigation of the monopolies of our tobacco by the Farmers-general, and a free admission of our productions into their islands.” Read more »

Mr. Rode is pictured here with Thom Wright, a FAS agricultural attaché in India, and one of Mr. Rode’s American-origin Holstein crosses which won a milk production award at the Progressive Dairy Farmers Association show.

Halfway around the world, a farmer in India stands proudly in the winner’s circle with his cow. Mr. S. Sukharpreet Singh Rode, the farmer, is a 2008 graduate of the Cochran Fellowship Program, an educational exchange program administered by USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS). Read more »