Today, the US Government announces major new funding at the Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa to achieve food security by 2030, as part of its commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These goals will be finalised in September to move forward the open data revolution in the agriculture and nutrition sectors.  See the USDA blog. The United States has invested heavily in agricultural data science and has pioneered methods to improve the interoperability of data sets, a crucial element in enabling the use of data for decision-making. The United States will continue its commitment to make agriculture and nutrition data open. In the next two years, it will invest nearly $50 million to help organisations make more data open, including through the Maize Genome Database,  SoyBase,  GrainGenes, GRIN, PubAg,  Ag Data Commons and  Nutrition Databases. This will improve the infrastructure for analyzing and using agriculturally relevant data such as iPlant and iAnimal and improve the interoperability of data that has been made open and available to researchers globally, including within the Global Agricultural Concept Scheme  (GACS)).

  As part of its commitment to open data, the US has committed $4 million to deepen and expand the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative, matching the commitment made by the United Kingdom. GODAN supports global efforts to make agricultural and nutritionally relevant data available, accessible, and usable for unrestricted use worldwide. GODAN is now a rapidly growing partnership of over 130 organizations actively involved in promoting open data as a powerful tool for improved decision-making to benefit governments, non-governmental organizations, businesses, consumers and farmers in the field. The data enables them to use information to improve food production and promote good nutrition on a worldwide scale.