WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Sonny Ramaswamy spoke to a gathering of Purdue University faculty, staff and students last month to give a NIFA update of the organization’s goals, understandings and funding opportunities for 2016.

The talk focused heavily on the subject of nutritional security. "I don’t frame the larger issue as food security, I frame it as nutritional security," Ramaswamy said. "In America, one out of seven people are nutritionally insecure."

He listed several effects of the population not having access to nutritional food or not making healthy food decisions, including hypertension in children, and heart disease and diabetes in adults. One of the most staggering concerns is the projection that children born in the first decade of the 2000s will have a shorter lifespan than their parents.

"If you look at all the biological and non-biological factors that impact our ability to achieve nutritional security, it gives you a sense of the priority we are developing at NIFA," he said. "It gives you a sense of what my staff and I are worried about."

Some of the biological and non-biological factors Ramaswamy specified were climate change, water and land availability, food safety, crop pest pressure and anything else that may inhibit the industry from growing the crops and livestock needed to achieve nutritional security.

He also pointed out nutritional security cannot be achieved without healthy decisions on the consumer level – which is why some of NIFA’s grants may involve dealing with healthy lifestyles and choices. "Inherent in that nutritional security is how people can have better attitudes, behavior and approaches toward nutrition," he explained. "I can tell you that we are going to be investing between $35 million and $40 million in nutrition in the broad sense, focusing on children between the ages of 2 and 19 on behavioral aspects of nutrition."

Ramaswamy encouraged students and staff to consider postdoctoral research into issues inhibiting nutritional security, as well as production of nutritious fruit and vegetables. "We hope to deploy both the monetary resources we bring to the table, and the intellectual resources you all bring to the table in this effort," he said.

Other topics touched on in the NIFA update included the incorporation of African-American, Native American and Latino individuals to the agricultural workforce, as well as the surplus of agricultural jobs that will be available in the next five years. "At the USDA, we will be turning over about a third of our workforce – that’s 95,000 employees and positions that need to be filled," Ramaswamy pointed out.

The update concluded with him encouraging researchers to sign up for grants on the NIFA website at http://nifa.usda.gov/grants