Sir

In your Editorial 'A research menu' (Nature 453, 1–2; 2008), you highlight the need to spend more on agricultural science to overcome today's food crisis. But this is not just a matter of greater expenditure — the way in which the money is spent is also important.

Reduced public spending on agricultural research might well be partly to blame for the present crisis. But it is also true that what funding there is has increasingly been directed towards molecular aspects of plant growth and development, arguably at the expense of practical agronomy and breeding issues.

Progress in understanding plant molecular biology is impressive, and useful applications are evident when the trait in question is relatively simple. But improvements in yield and input efficiency — essential for sustainability — stem almost exclusively from traditional breeding and agronomy.

Molecular tools such as gene-expression and metabolite profiling are a long way from becoming incorporated into selection procedures for complex-trait breeding. There are many well-characterized quantitative trait loci (stretches of DNA closely linked to the genes that underlie a trait) that affect yield, but there are no clear examples of such loci being successfully backcrossed into high-performance crops.

Diverting most of the limited agricultural-research resources into molecular biology makes it harder to obtain routine funding to improve traditional breeding and agronomy. So, although we agree that a marked increase in funding is necessary, funding bodies should be aware that preferred allocation to molecular biology risks delaying progress on the pressing issue of improving crop productivity.

In this context, European reluctance to fund research into yield improvement has important implications for European as well as developing countries. As the 'green revolution' example shows, such knowledge is useful beyond geographical frontiers.