Yesterday, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that USDA awarded a $280 million grant to the Texas Department of Agriculture to pay farmers affected by water shortages in her home state. Water scarcity has put Texas farmers crops’ at risk and shuttered the state’s last sugar mill, and Mexico is far behind on its obligations to share water from the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers.
But the announcement came on the same day that Politico reported another yet another USDA program’s already-allocated funding has been paused, this one covering $500 million for food banks, with $148 million in food purchases already canceled.
Overall, a lack of clarity remains as to which farmers and groups will receive grant payments and when. Yesterday, Civil Eats reviewed an email from a USDA employee saying the agency has completed its review of the Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP) and payments are cleared to resume, but several other programs remain frozen. (Link to this post.)
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