Additionally, many legal and institutional instruments are successfully used for land-use planning and managing growth. The U.S. hopes to participate in international exchanges and capacity building for such innovations and institutional arrangements. We are working to implement these goals through improved production and profitability, stewardship of the natural resource base and ecological system, and enhancement of the vitality of rural communities. Our U.S. Food Security Action Plan also advances both our domestic and international strategies for implementing these goals. For the first time in many years, the number of our small farms has increased rather than decreased.
Women now make up the largest category of beginning and small farmers in the United States.
We are making special efforts to meet the marketing, credit, educational and technological needs of small, under-served, minority, women, and beginning farmers. We emphasize local and regional consumer-farmer market linkages, like connections between new and value added products and innovative marketing strategies and structures. Improved yield technologies have also resulted in significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the Collaborative Research Support Programs bring together over 2000 scientists from 20 U.S. universities and 80 international research institutions to address issues from crop and livestock productivity to sustainable use of natural resources. Such links include regional and country-based biodiversity conservation programs, forestry and agroforestry, participatory watershed management, and coastal and inland waterways.