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Published online 30 April 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/453008a
Food crisis spurs research spending
Agricultural research comes in from the cold.
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Dear Editor: In the Editorial on page 1, China is blamed AGAIN. This time, China is named one of causes of the world food crisis ("In China and India there is ever more — and utterly reasonable — demand for a third meal in the day and more meat in the diet"). However, China has maintained food self-sufficiency for many years. For example, today there is a report from Guardian (UK) about China's food supply (http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle?id=7492801). It says "China is a net exporter of farm produce", "the (grain) reserves were 150-200 million tonnes -- much more than the market had guessed" and "there was little correlation between Chinese and global trends". Nowadays, "China bashing" is an easy excuse for western politicians. But Nature as the world's leading scientific journal, should definitely have higher standard than them when writing editorials.
Our political leaders need genuine concern for mankind and wisdom in responding to a crisis. For example, much of the current food crisis apparently came from the foolish decision to reduce the dependence of the United States on foreign oil by converting the US corn crop into ethanol for use as a bio-fuel. - Oliver K. Manuel, www.omatumr.com
Increase in funding (as mentioned in the article) in agricultural research in countries like India does not reflect the real situation. Many so-called agricultural research and plant biology institutes in India do not fulfill their institutional mandates by investing the allocated money on agricultural research. They divert good amount of that money to very basic research only to crank data, for data sake and publish some fancy articles in the name of Agricultural research. In reality, those costly (in terms of its economy and priority) researches have no short or long term relevance to agriculture of that country or the world. And the output of money invested in agricultural research in just pathetic in most of the Indian agricultural universities and research organizations like ICAR, CSIR etc. Accountability and transparency must be improved to have any meaningful output of the public money invested in plant biology and agricultural research there.
This may not be the right forum to comment on stellar research organizations such as ICAR, CSIR, DBT etc. focusing on agricultural research in India. However, it is an accepted fact that excellent data that is generated in the research institutes and universities is not being channeled in a systematic and scientific way to reach the end users. As mentioned in the editorial, agriculture extension has to play a big role in this scenario. Customized knowledge-base development and rapid dissemination in a user/farmer friendly way within the existing ICAR system should provide rich dividends in the medium to long term with respect to ROI.
Food crisis had been brewing up for quite sometime. Its true that public funding for agricultue research has declined over last decade or so but we should try to understand the reasons for such decline, primary reason being failure of public institutes to deliver the top quality products which can have impact in increasing crop yields, quality etc. Although lot of money is being budgeted by public institutes for research purpose but there is no cooperation among different departments / employees of inter and intra institutes hence all efforts go in vain. High quality scientists and researchers are leaving public institutes and joining private institutes or companies. Global effort is needed in streamlining the public agriculture research system with emphasis on proper dissemination of knowledge generated in timely and efficient manner. United Nations should ideally lead the fight to save humanity from looming food crisis.