Food for Opportunity

The objective of FFO is to complement existing food assistance programming, which principally use row crops and vegetable oils, with commodities not commonly used in food assistance, in order to better understand how these can be integrated into exis

FFO provides agricultural commodities other than those traditionally used in established preschool and school food for education programs in eligible countries, with the intention of improving food security, reducing the incidence of hunger, and improving literacy and primary education.

Private voluntary organizations, cooperatives, intergovernmental organizations, and governments of developing countries and their agencies, and other organizations.

FFO focuses on developing countries in which the national government of the recipient country is fully committed to achieving the goals of the World Declaration on Education for All and is taking steps to improve the quality and availability of education.

In determining whether an entity will be eligible to be a participant, FAS may consider the entity's previous compliance or noncompliance with the provisions of 7 CFR 1599. FAS may consider matters such as whether the entity corrected deficiencies in the implementation of an agreement in a timely manner and whether the entity has filed timely and accurate reports and other submissions that are required to be filed with FAS and other agencies of the United States.

Agricultural commodities provided under FFO shall be used for the awarded school nutrition programs. Financial assistance may be used for all allocable, reasonable, and allowable expenses. Certain cost items may have specific minimum, maximum, and tracking requirements.

Agreements normally include assistance or program implementation periods of 2-3 years; extensions may be available under certain circumstances.

Applications must be submitted using the USDA Food Aid Information System at https://www.fas.usda.gov/fais/webapp/

Applicants will be evaluated based on the extent and quality to which they demonstrate that they have the capabilities, staff, and resources to successfully perform the project, as well as the quality of their demonstration. FAS will use these criteria to evaluate the content provided by Applicants' submissions and award points using the point system specified in the Notice of Funding Opportunity. FAS may invite comments from other USG agencies on its award recommendations, but FAS will make the final determination on which applications to accept.

FAS will assemble a panel committee consisting of technical reviewers and scorers to review applications for each individual Funding Opportunity or Track. This panel may include both Federal and non-Federal persons. The panel committee will review the programmatic merits of the applications based on the evaluation criteria identified in the Notice of Funding Opportunity. Following panel committee review, technical reviewer and scorers who participated on the panel committee will provide summary comments, scorers and funding recommendations on the application. The FAS Administrator will make the final selection of applications to approve for funding. The FAS Administrator will give serious consideration to recommendations from the panel committees, but may also consider the following factors in making the award selections: Agency priorities, such as achieving greater geographical dispersion, program balance, or diversity; and the agency's alignment within the whole of government approach to agricultural development and innovation, as determined by USDA.