The 2011 ASHS Annual Conference

The Horticulture CRSP is a product of the Global Horticultural Assessment conducted during 2004-05. It is one of ten Collaborative Research Support Programs funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to address poverty and hunger among the rural poor living in developing countries. Funded in 2009 for five years, and managed by the University of California at Davis and partner universities Cornell, Hawaii, and North Carolina State, Hort CRSP uses the horticulture value chain to improve incomes, nutrition, health, and economic well being for the rural poor, particularly women.  Fifteen Immediate Impact Projects were initiated in February 2010. Ten Exploratory Projects and five longer term Pilot Projects were initiated in January 2011.  Ten U.S. universities and numerous international and in-country institutions, agencies and organizations collaborate in more than 20 countries to identify and adapt technologies that can have a broad scale impact on poverty and hunger and to build capacity for the sustainability of these impacts.  A discussion of the major programmatic emphases, collaborating horticulturists, and scalable technologies will be presented by the Hort CRSP leadership, with additional participation by Principal Investigators (PIs) of a few of these 30 projects.