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.

The last major wheat rust epidemic, in the 1950s, destroyed about 40% of the U.S. spring wheat crop. Worldwide, even a far more limited outbreak than that of the 1950s could have a huge impact, because wheat is nearly a third of grain production, and global food stockpiles are the lowest in decades.

"Food, over the past half-century, has basically been taken for granted in this country," Coffman says.

By the numbers

From 1970 to 2005, the U.S. population grew by 100 million and the economy grew 293%, but Agriculture Department research funding rose by $650 million, or just 1.85% a year. By comparison, in that same period Congress approved $22.6 billion in increased research at the National Institutes of Health, Jeffrey Armstrong, dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University, said in a presentation at a Chicago Federal Reserve seminar.

U.S. agricultural productivity rose at a 2% pace from 1950 to 1989, but has slowed to a 1.1% rate from 1990 to 2002, according to Pardey. Worldwide yields for wheat, corn and rice are rising about half as fast as a decade ago.

"The slowdown effect is kicking in," Pardey said of flat spending for crop research and slower yield growth.

Lower productivity may not sound like a big deal, but it means billions of dollars in higher costs and lower profits for farmers, and more stress on limited land and water. The ethanol industry, which will consume a third of this year's U.S. corn crop, is banking on enormous gains in corn yields to remain viable. New technologies are also needed to meet federal goals for other, alternative biofuels. Global warming and changing weather patterns are increasing the urgency to find new crop varieties.

Adding to the difficulty of reorienting research priorities is the fact that federal funds have been flowing increasingly to pet projects of members of Congress. Lawmakers in some years allocate as much as a fifth of overall agriculture research, education and economic funds, which totaled about $2.5 billion last year, through earmarks for such things as high-desert landscaping or urban aquaculture, says the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Crop scientists are divided on congressional earmarks. Cornell's Coffman says earmarks have sustained some important, low-profile crop-research programs. But Richard Standiford, of the University of California system, says his state is shortchanged by earmarks and does better under competitive programs.

Prodded by the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, Congress in a new five-year farm bill created a program for competitive funding into food safety, organic agriculture and other areas. Scientists hope the competitive research will also free up additional funds elsewhere, and pending spending bills do include increased aid.

Fred Cholick, dean of agriculture at Kansas State University, says stepped up research is vital given global warming, growth of the biofuels industry and surging demand worldwide.

Industry-funded research has increased dramatically as federal funding has stalled, helping pick up the slack. Private firms are also mounting initiatives to address tight global food supplies. Agriculture giant Monsanto, a worldwide leader in developing seed and plant varieties, in June said it would provide a five-year, $10 million grant to improve rice and wheat yields, with the research to be overseen by experts on food production in poor countries. Monsanto will also try to double yields of its genetically modified corn and soybeans.

Industry-financed research, though, has its limits in feeding a hungry world. Corporations, with a bottom line to meet, are more likely to focus on areas that benefit rich nations, or to shy away from long-term projects with uncertain payoffs.

Chris Hurt, agricultural economist at Purdue University, notes that major crop-science advances in recent decades have relied on publicly financed research that was widely disseminated, as opposed to closely held corporate research. Companies, Hurt says, take the approach, "If you want this (private) technology, you have to pay us for this technology."

New green revolution

In the mid-20th century, foundation money — mainly from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations — fueled the international push to increase crop yields to match the nutritional needs of a growing global population. The so-called Green Revolution spread plant-breeding techniques pioneered by Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug, the Iowa-born researcher, during the 1940s through the 1960s. It eventually doubled crop production in developing nations and brought India from the brink of starvation.

Today, the Gates Foundation has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars for agriculture research and has joined with the Rockefeller Foundation to create the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, AGRA. The first major initiatives are seeking to improve seed varieties in Africa, where the population is malnourished in several nations.

Meanwhile, stem rust continues to threaten wheat harvests worldwide. The USDA's Cereal Disease Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, the only domestic facility with a full-time researcher working on stem rust, faced a $300,000 cut — about 17% of its funding — in the annual budget proposed by the White House. That would slow the lab's work on a host of potential threats to crops. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has restored funding for the program in a pending spending bill. USDA has 10 scientists elsewhere working on facets of the problem.

Dangerous wheat rust strain spreads

Wheat rust has been around since the Romans, but until recently it had been largely under control. Improved strains of wheat provided protection to farmers for most of the past half-century, but new forms of the disease have evolved.

The latest threatening strain of stem rust was discovered in Uganda in 1999, and the so-called Ug99 has spread from East Africa to Yemen and Sudan and is now in Iran. The prevailing winds could carry the spores into India and Pakistan. The USDA this fall will release the first lines of wheat with genes for resistance to Ug99, and commercial breeders can use them to develop new varieties. The breeds were developed by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, which patched together funding, working in collaboration with researchers worldwide.

At the Minnesota lab, director Marty Carson says researchers are still years away from a new wheat type with both resistance to Ug99 and other desirable traits, like hardiness.

"We're somewhat fortunate here that we detected this new (strain of wheat stem rust) as soon as we did," Carson says. "Hopefully we've bought a little bit of time in order to prepare for it. Right now (the worry) is what happens if it gets into South Asia?"

In addition to whatever federal money Carson's lab receives, the Gates Foundation grant will provide money for work in Minnesota. The Gates grant will also finance stem rust research in Kenya, Ethiopia, Mexico and other countries.

Kathy Kahn, an executive of the Gates Foundation, says it's "hard to overstate the seriousness" of the stem rust problem. "Given (high) world food prices, even a 10% loss in (wheat) production would be devastating," she says. "We've taken our eye off the ball on things like wheat rust. When you haven't seen the disease for a long time, you get complacent."