Cornell has been selected to lead a $5.5 million-plus project in Bangladesh as part of a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) $212 million Food for Progress program to provide international assistance in 2009.

The Cornell program, led by John Duxbury, Cornell professor of soil science and international agriculture, and Julie Lauren, a senior research associate in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, will seek to implement solutions to environmental constraints to agricultural production in Bangladesh, including acidic soils and groundwater issues.

Under the program, the USDA plans to purchase more than $3.675 million worth of soybean oil on the U.S. market. Cornell will work with Cooperative Business International Inc., an Ohio-based company, to sell the oil in Bangladesh, and Duxbury and colleagues will use the proceeds to implement new management practices and technologies to improve agricultural productivity in Bangladesh. The USDA also will contribute $1.879 million in cash for the project.

"Our primary role is to implement an outreach project, rather than research," Duxbury said.

In the past, Duxbury and Lauren have done research to better understand the environmental constraints to agricultural production in Bangladesh. Such constraints include acidic soils that reduce yields of many crops in the productive northern half of the country; irregular availability of groundwater irrigation and fertilizer; and arsenic contamination of the groundwater in the southern half of Bangladesh, which builds up in the soil, can be toxic to rice and gets in rice grain, making it a threat to human health.

The Cornell Food for Progress project will apply Duxbury and Lauren's research by implementing solutions to these environmental constraints. The Cornell-Bangladesh team will provide training and loans to farmers; develop businesses that can supply machinery and tillage services so that farmers can adopt new technologies; and build the capacities of national agricultural institutions and nongovernmental organizations to provide technical support to farmers and agribusinesses.