“There shall be at the seat of government a Department of Agriculture, the general design and duties of which shall be to acquire and to diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with agriculture, rural development, aquaculture, and human nutrition, in the most general and comprehensive sense of those terms, and to procure, propagate, and distribute among the people new and valuable seeds and plants.” 7 U.S. Code § 2201 – Establishment of Department

The passage of the Smith Lever Act of 1914 established the USDA’s partnership with land-grant universities, essentially taking over and nationalizing the agricultural extension work being done by the General Education Board in the South. Persuading governments to take demonstration work to scale was one of philanthropy’s core strategies.

In 1930 the organization known as Near East Relief was reorganized as the Near East Foundation and began to provide technical assistance in agriculture and public health in rural communities in Iran, Greece, and Syria, eventually expanding to fifteen other countries in the region.

“In the field of world policy, I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.” – FDR Inaugural Address

This was Roosevelt’s attempt to do away with using American military intervention to maintain stability in the Western hemisphere (particularly in Latin America) and focus instead on cooperation and trade.

Nelson Rockefeller established the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) and the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC). This connected the resources of the US government, private corporations, and the non-profit sector to aid in community development through agriculture in Latin America.

Congress subsequently allocated $13.3B in economic aid with the specific goal of promoting industrial and agricultural production in post-WWII Europe. This plan was twofold: using American foreign aid to get Europe back on its own feet economically, and impeding the Soviet Union’s desire for continued economic chaos in Western Europe.

“The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair-dealing. All countries, including our own, will greatly benefit from a constructive program for the better use of the world’s human and natural resources.” – Harry S. Truman’s Inaugural Address

The goal of the Council (ADC) was to strengthen the professional capacity of Asian countries to deal with the economic and human problems of agricultural and rural development. Several decades later, in 1985, the ADC would merge with other entities, including the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Agricultural Development Service (IADS), to form Winrock International.

This act permitted the president to authorize the shipment of surplus commodities to “friendly” nations. This would become known as the Food for Peace program.

President John F Kennedy expanded upon President Eisenhower’s Food for Peace program to establish USAID to counter Soviet influence through the deployment of foreign aid.

In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring investigated the hazards of chemical pesticides like DDT, widely used in high-efficiency agriculture, and questioned the ecological cost of the postwar “progress.” Silent Spring sparked the environmental movement and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.” – speech before the Society for Agricultural Development, Washington, DC

The Program-Related Investment (PRI) — where foundations supported for-profit initiatives — was a new tool funders could utilize to invest in minority-related agricultural projects such as the Southern Cooperative Development Fund, which offered financial and technical support to small farmers’ cooperatives throughout the South.

The New Alchemy Institute was founded in 1969 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts to explore adaptive strategies for sustainable living in an overburdened natural environment.

The Southern Program was one of several philanthropic efforts focused on equity building for Black rural Southerners through agricultural development and land ownership.

Rockefeller scientist Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work alleviating world hunger through agricultural innovation.

CGIAR, originally known as the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, was formed from the four original research institutes built by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, with support from the World Bank. CGIAR continues to be a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security.

“Profound changes have come in the past few years in the general understanding of the environment. Viewpoints have dramatically altered. Knowledge has been increasing and perceptions deepening for a long time, of course, but the shocks of the recent past—the reports of famine, evidence of pollution, unassimilated waste, shortages of energy and other resources—produced a new general awareness of relationships among parts of the natural system.” – 1974 RBF Annual Report

Originally a model farm and livestock center in Arkansas demonstrating state-of-the-art agricultural methods, the organization is now known simply as Winrock International, which works globally “to empower the disadvantaged, increase economic opportunity and sustain natural resources.”

By the early 1980s, the United States was losing 12 square miles of rural land each day. After funding a feasibility study through the Conservation Foundation, in 1980 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund helped establish the American Farmland Trust, the first national, non-profit institution committed exclusively to the conservation of agricultural resources. 

The Live Aid benefit concert was held simultaneously in Philadelphia and in London to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young held the first Farm Aid concert in September 1985 to benefit US family farmers.

Widely thought of as the Nobel Prize for agriculture, the World Food Prize was founded by Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug as a way to inspire and reward innovations in global agriculture. Borlaug originally approached the Nobel Committee, only to discover that it was bound by the limited topical parameters put in place by Alfred Nobel’s will. Establishing the World Food Prize under the Nobel umbrella proved impossible. Borlaug then found a benefactor in the General Foods Corporation, but a company restructuring put the award’s funding in jeopardy; it was saved in 1990 with an endowment given by philanthropist John Ruan and his family. The prize has been awarded annually since 1987 to ”individuals that have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity, or availability of food in the world.”

The Beijer Institute was an early foray by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund into funding climate change research and a continuation of the environmental work it had begun in the 1970s with grants to organizations such as the New Alchemy Institute.

It is important to note that Borlaug’s famed innovations in plant breeding in the 1940s were accomplished without the benefit of knowledge of DNA (which was discovered in 1953), and therefore without the biotechnology that would later become commonplace for genetic modification. In fact, one of his earliest achievements was developing grains that simply grew faster. The genomic mapping of rice in the late 1980s developed under the Rockefeller Foundation’s Rice Biotechnology Program signified that the time-consuming processes of trial and error were rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

In the early 1980s, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund saw the collapse of the Soviet Union on the horizon and began work in Poland to revitalize Polish agriculture and encourage East-West relations, including introducing the Western concept of non-governmental public service organizations. At the time, Poland was under martial law as the Soviet-backed government cracked down on anti-communist organizing. The FDPA was officially established “as a private independent non-governmental organisation in 1988, whose main objective was to support the restructuring of Polish agriculture and food economy, the transformation of the Polish countryside and the building of civil society.” – FDPA

The United Nations convenes its first Conference on Environment and Development

Al Gore’s ominous documentary was a global call-to-action to prevent and reverse the effects of climate change. It earned him both an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Much like Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s, An Inconvenient Truth shone a light on the consequences of industrialization and is credited with revitalizing the environmental movement.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to found the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), “based on a shared vision that investing in agriculture is the surest path to reducing poverty and hunger in Africa.” AGRA builds upon the knowledge gained over the last century of agricultural research while attempting to address the particular challenges that have prevented substantial agricultural development in Africa in the past, such as climate, smallholder farming, and gender inequality.