[Pil-pc-oceania] Food crisis spurs research spending (Nature journal)

[Deb Guildner]

Food crisis spurs research spending
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080430//full/453008a.html

Excerpt:

More than 20 United Nations development agencies joined the World Bank and 
the World Trade Organization this week in Bern, Switzerland, to discuss 
emergency humanitarian aid and other measures to combat the growing world 
food crisis. The World Food Programme says it needs an extra US$755 million 
just to meet existing needs for food aid.

The acute crisis is mainly due to market causes, but it is throwing the 
spotlight on the underlying problem of chronic underinvestment in 
agricultural research, experts say.

"It's a wake-up call, says Nienke Beintema, who heads the Agricultural 
Science & Technology Indicators (ASTI) initiative at the International Food 
Policy Research Institute in Wageningen in the Netherlands. "Agricultural 
research had fallen off the international agenda," she says. "The food 
crisis has brought into focus the need for agriculture for economic 
development - and that people need food.

Overall, public spending on research such as pest and disease control and 
high-yielding crop varieties is growing in developing countries. However, 
this growth is largely accounted for by just four countries: China, India, 
Brazil and South Africa, according to the report. In many other developing 
countries, home to hundreds of millions of people, the report finds that 
spending is "stagnating or slipping".

That trend is all the more worrying because developing countries are 
benefiting less and less from transfer of the results of intensive 
agricultural research carried out by rich countries, says Frances Kimmins, a 
lead author of the IAASTD report. The rate of growth in investment in 
agricultural research by industrialized countries ground to a halt following 
rapid growth from the 1960s to the early 1980s after decades of food 
surpluses. And focus has shifted away from improving crop varieties towards 
food processing and other 'added-value' products, which are less relevant to 
farmers in developing countries.

In developed countries, most agricultural research is increasingly done by 
the private sector, which will not invest in crops and practices for which 
there are small or nonexistent markets, and where patents prevent the spread 
of technologies. Taken together, these trends represent a drying-up of past 
sources of technology transfer from wealthy to developing countries, and 
make a case for renewed public investment in developed nations, says 
Kimmins, who is also an agricultural expert at the UK-based development 
consultancy NR International."