USDA's $226M Food for Progress FY26 NOFO Names Seven Priority Countries Under an 'America First' Framing — and the Country List Is the Substantive Signal

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service published its Fiscal Year 2026 Notice of Funding Opportunity for the Food for Progress program on the federal grants portal in early June, with applications due at 5:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, July 6, 2026. The headline figure is $226 million across cooperative agreements ranging from $28 million to $35 million each over project periods of up to five years. The procedural mechanics will be familiar to any organization that has previously implemented a Food for Progress award: the recipient receives U.S.-grown agricultural commodities, monetizes them in the recipient country, and uses the proceeds to fund agricultural-sector development activities in that country.

The substantive shift is not in the financing mechanism. It is in the seven-country priority list — Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ecuador, Morocco, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand — and in the explicit framing of FY26 Food for Progress as part of "America First International Food Assistance Programming." For experienced implementers of the Biden-era and Trump-first-term Food for Progress portfolios, the new geography is a sharp pivot, and the strategic implications run from project design through partnership selection through commodity-monetization risk modeling.

The mechanics that have not changed

Food for Progress was created by the Food for Progress Act of 1985 and has operated continuously as the FAS's principal market-development and food-security cooperative agreement program. The structure remains distinctive among federal grant programs in that the federal "award" is denominated in agricultural commodities, not dollars. USDA's Commodity Credit Corporation purchases U.S.-grown commodities at producer-level prices; the recipient organization arranges shipping, takes title at destination, sells the commodities into the recipient-country market, and channels the resulting local-currency proceeds into the agreed agricultural-sector activities. The dollar value of the award is the commodity value plus the freight and administrative cost; the program-implementation budget the recipient actually controls is the local-currency monetization proceeds.

For FY26, eligible commodities include the standard Food for Progress slate (wheat, soybeans, soybean oil, corn, rice, lentils, peas, and related products), with the specific commodity assignment negotiated between FAS and the recipient at the cooperative-agreement-amendment stage. Recipients can request preferred commodity mixes in the application; FAS retains discretion to substitute based on CCC inventory and U.S. commodity-market conditions.

Eligibility for Food for Progress remains broad: foreign governments, private voluntary organizations, nonprofits, intergovernmental organizations, cooperatives, universities, and U.S. or foreign commercial entities can all apply, though the application requires demonstrated implementation capacity in the recipient country and a credible monetization plan. In practice, the program has historically been dominated by a relatively small number of experienced implementers — ACDI/VOCA, Land O'Lakes Venture37, Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, TechnoServe, Winrock International, and a handful of similar organizations capture the substantial majority of awards in most cycles.

The project-period cap of five years and the per-project award range of $28-35 million is consistent with the prior several cycles. The total $226 million envelope is essentially flat against FY25.

The priority country list — what changed and why it matters

The pivot is in the priority country list. The Biden-administration FY24 Food for Progress priority list included a heavy concentration of African countries (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Senegal, Tanzania, and others) reflecting the prior administration's emphasis on Sub-Saharan African food-security partnerships. The FY26 priority list reduces the African footprint to one country (Morocco) and substantially expands the Indo-Pacific (Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand) and the Western Hemisphere (Bolivia, Ecuador).

Read together with the explicit "America First International Food Assistance Programming" framing FAS adopted in the FY26 priority-country stakeholder announcement, the new list reads as a deliberate alignment of food assistance with U.S. commercial agriculture export strategy. Bangladesh and the Philippines are among the largest commercial markets for U.S. wheat and soybean exports in Asia. Thailand and Vietnam (which is not on this list but historically receives U.S. agricultural-exports outreach) are significant rice and feed-grain importers. Bolivia and Ecuador host U.S. agricultural research and value-chain partnerships with longstanding USDA institutional histories. Morocco is the bridge — the one African priority country, and notable both for its standing as a U.S. commercial agriculture market and for its parallel Millennium Challenge Corporation engagement.

For implementers, the practical consequence is that FY26 Food for Progress applications need to be designed around projects that visibly serve both food-security objectives in the recipient country and demonstrable market-development objectives that benefit U.S. agricultural exporters over the medium term. Pure smallholder-livelihood projects without an explicit U.S. commercial-agriculture connection are unlikely to score well against the FY26 priorities. Projects that build local market demand for U.S. wheat (bakery development, food-processing capacity building), U.S. soybean meal (livestock-feed value chains), or U.S. specialty crops are more likely to align.

The monetization risk model in the priority countries

Food for Progress monetization is, in practical terms, a commodity arbitrage operation conducted in the recipient country. The implementer takes title to several thousand metric tons of U.S. commodities at port of arrival, navigates customs and import-licensing requirements, contracts with in-country buyers, and converts the commodities to local currency through structured sales. The local-currency proceeds are then deployed against the project budget over the five-year period of performance.

The monetization risk varies substantially across the seven priority countries. Bangladesh has deep and competitive markets for imported wheat and edible oils, and U.S. commodities can typically be sold at near-market prices through established trading relationships. The Philippines similarly has a large, competitive market for U.S. soybean meal and wheat. Thailand is a more complex market because of strong domestic agricultural production and tariff structures; monetization timing matters and the implementer needs sophisticated commodity-market access.

Bolivia and Ecuador present different challenges. Both have smaller import markets, more concentrated buyer structures, and historically more currency-volatility exposure. Implementers in these countries have typically used local-currency forward contracts and structured monetization timing to manage foreign-exchange risk. Sri Lanka, given its 2022-2024 economic crisis, presents the highest country-risk profile on the list; implementers will need to model both monetization yield and foreign-exchange convertibility risk explicitly.

Morocco is the most familiar market for the major U.S. food-aid implementers, with deep U.S. commercial-agriculture relationships through ONICL (the Office National Interprofessionnel des Céréales et des Légumineuses) and an established commodity-import infrastructure.

For application development, the monetization plan is among the most heavily scrutinized sections of a Food for Progress proposal. Implementers proposing operations in Sri Lanka or Bolivia need to invest substantial diligence in the monetization analysis; implementers proposing operations in Bangladesh or the Philippines can leverage standard market-clearing assumptions.

The "America First" framing and the policy backdrop

The May 2026 FAS stakeholder announcement that established the FY26 priority countries was the first to explicitly frame Food for Progress as "America First International Food Assistance Programming." That framing aligns Food for Progress with the broader 2026 federal grants policy environment — the OMB May 29 proposed Uniform Grants Regulation rewrite, the political pre-issuance review provisions under §200.205, the cost-allowability restrictions on lobbying, advertising, conferences, and the prohibitions on "diversity, equity, and inclusion" activities as grant conditions.

For Food for Progress applicants, the practical implications of the broader policy frame are: project narratives should emphasize U.S. commercial-agriculture and food-security benefits over abstract development-policy framings; monitoring-and-evaluation frameworks should foreground measurable U.S. trade and market-development indicators alongside food-security indicators; and partner organization profiles should not foreground DEI program credentials in ways that could trigger cost-allowability or merit-review concerns under the new framework.

This is a meaningful shift from how Food for Progress proposals have been written across the past three administrations. The prior practice of foregrounding global food-security justification language and aligning Food for Progress with Sustainable Development Goal indicators is, in the current environment, a strategic miscalculation. The substantive food-security work that Food for Progress funds will continue and is consistent with both the new priorities and the prior framings; the framing of that work has to change.

What experienced implementers should do this month

Three operational priorities for organizations preparing FY26 Food for Progress applications:

First, complete in-country partner identification by mid-June. Food for Progress applications require demonstrated implementing-partner relationships in the recipient country, and the seven-country priority list includes several markets where the major U.S. implementers do not have established platforms. Bangladesh and the Philippines have strong existing implementing-partner ecosystems. Bolivia, Ecuador, and Sri Lanka have more limited options; implementers entering these markets need to identify partners now.

Second, model commodity monetization yields against current market conditions for the target country. The FAS scoring framework heavily weights monetization-plan credibility, and implementers using prior-cycle yield assumptions for changed market conditions (Sri Lanka in particular) will underperform.

Third, align project narratives with the "America First" framing. Tightly scoped projects that build measurable U.S. agricultural-export market demand, support local food-security indicators that link to U.S.-grown commodity penetration, and avoid the policy-flagged framings of the prior cycle will score better than ambitious global-development narratives that do not align with the FY26 framing.

The July 6 deadline allows roughly five weeks for proposal preparation. That is tight for new implementers and standard for the experienced field. For coverage of USDA international food-aid programs and FAS policy developments, see Granted News.