An Urban's Rural View

Anyone who cares about agriculture must care about agricultural research. It's the fountainhead of solutions to agriculture's most vexing challenges -- fighting new pests and diseases, coping with climate change, meeting the public's expanding nutritional and food-safety demands, to mention just a few.

Anyone who cares about agricultural research must care about fundamental or basic research. It's the factory that manufactures the science that gives rise to technologies, including agricultural technologies. It forges the knowledge that becomes knowhow. Its benefits are big and broadly shared across society.

Anyone who cares about basic ag research must worry about how it's organized and funded. Because its benefits are broadly shared and often take decades to materialize, it offers little short-term advantage to business executives or politicians.

Companies chip in a bit for it but naturally prefer to invest in applied research that gives them quicker, proprietary payoffs. Governments are the more natural supporters, but nobody gets elected by standing up for basic ag research. In tight budgetary times government support can stagnate.

That's what's happening in the U.S. According to a report from the Charles Valentine Riley Foundation and Iowa State University, "Federal funding of research through USDA declined 16% from 2005 to 2012 and lags woefully behind other government-supported research." (http://bit.ly/…)

In 1980, a Choices magazine article reports, the U.S. accounted for 17% of the world's public food-and-agriculture research-and-development spending, a percentage point more than Brazil, India and China combined. (http://tiny.cc/…) In 2009, the U.S. spent only 13% of the world's total; Brazil, Indian and China shelled out 31%.

This trend must be reversed, the agriculture world's big thinkers agree. The U.S. needs more ag research, basic and applied. A 2012 report to President Barack Obama by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology urged the U.S. to invest an additional $700 million a year on agricultural research. (http://tiny.cc/…)

To make ag research more productive, the report also called for increased use of competition in allocating R & D funds, more private-public partnerships and more fellowships for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers.

The Riley/ISU report, issued last November, argued for a "unifying message" that puts aside "the self-interest that often fragments the effectiveness" of agriculture's case for increased research resources.

As former ag secretary Dan Glickman put it in a foreword to the report, "Each segment of agriculture must come out of its silo and think less about business-as-usual winners and losers. Each must think more about the advantages of working together with a broader set of society's stakeholders on a common agenda and a common end."

In the 2014 farm bill, Congress took a step toward bolstering ag research by creating the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research. FFAR is a non-profit corporation with a mission to seek private funding for research into "problems of national and international significance," using federal money to match the private (http://tiny.cc/…). Unfortunately, Congress allocated a paltry $200 million over five years—a mere $40 million a year—to the effort, which limits what FFAR can accomplish.

Congressmen have also introduced bills to create "agricultural research organizations" whose tax-exempt status would encourage more private contributions to the cause. So far, though, legislation to create AROs has gone nowhere.

But the brainstorming continues. On January 28 the Farm Foundation will conduct a panel discussion on "Tools to Fund Agricultural Research (http://tiny.cc/…)." The Farm Foundation has assembled an impressive panel of experts to discuss these issues:

-- Keith Fuglie, a USDA economist whom Farm Foundation president Neil Conklin calls his "go-to guy" for answers to ag-research questions;

-- Harold Browning, chief operations officer of the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, an industry-led research response to Florida's citrus-greening crisis;

-- Matt McKenna, a senior USDA adviser and key figure at FFAR;

-- Steve Rhines, a vice president at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, whose many interests include AROs.

The forum will begin at 9 a.m. Eastern time at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. But you don't have to be in Washington to follow the proceedings and ask questions. The Farm Foundation will audio-cast the forum, live and free. You can sign up for it at http://tiny.cc/….

I will be moderating the discussion. I hope you will join us.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(CZ)

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