Money for crop research just a drop in the bucket

WASHINGTON -- A deadly wheat fungus known as stem rust is shriveling crops from Africa to the Middle East, threatening the breadbasket of Pakistan and India, and could eventually reach the United States.

The potential threat to food supplies and the economy is enormous, yet Congress and the White House during the past several years did not react to urgent pleas from U.S. scientists for millions of dollars to develop wheat varieties resistant to stem rust. Instead, the main federal lab working on the disease fought budget cuts.

Help now appears to be on the way. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this spring promised $27 million to Cornell University to run an international research effort to thwart stem rust: a fungus borne by the wind, on clothing or in cargo holds that creates sores on wheat stems that blacken and wipe out once-healthy plants. In Congress, pending spending bills would increase research. But the inability of the federal government to react quickly to a potential crisis — about 90% of all commercial wheat varieties are susceptible to the new strain of the disease — is a telling statement about the beleaguered state of federal crop science funding.

U.S. government spending for agricultural research has been largely flat for a decade. Priorities have shifted from long-term efforts that increase yields, a development that has contributed to the current global food crisis as the world copes with shrinking grain supplies and record prices.

Limited funds have been siphoned to emerging areas such as biofuels, nutrition and food safety while aid to international research bodies has been reduced, says Phillip Pardey, director of the International Science and Technology Practice and Policy Center at the University of Minnesota.

Private industry and non-profit sources, such as the Gates Foundation, are stepping into the breach. Congress, in a recent, five-year farm bill, took a major step toward boosting agriculture science programs, and the World Bank has promised a broad effort to increase global food development. But the U.S. government, a longtime leader in financing research aimed at increasing world harvests, is still behind soaring need as the world stares down the most serious food crisis in a generation and the United Nations calls for doubling food production by 2030.

"The agriculture-research system … has eroded very significantly over the past few decades and was, and is, unable to respond adequately to a threat such as (stem rust)," says Ronnie Coffman, chair of the Cornell Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, who is administering the Gates Foundation grant.