WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 (UPI) -- With obesity up and the farm trade surplus down a coalition of land-grant universities and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is pushing to establish a new $1 billion research institute aimed at improving agricultural competitiveness and the quality of food production.
The idea is to take discoveries in biology and medical science and apply them to crops and livestock. Backers of the idea hope to reduce farm costs and make U.S. farmers more competitive. They also are looking to scientists to develop entirely new products, such as meats with modified fat content or eggs with medicinally beneficial proteins engineered into them. Some issues a new government institute would take on -- such as reducing the environmental impact of agriculture -- need research, the coalition members say, but there are unlikely to draw private R&D investment.
The proposal also appears aimed at simply raising the profile of agricultural research and keeping it from losing ground as more and more federal research money is poured into high-profile biomedical projects and anti-terrorism technology.
"If you begin to look at things like medical research, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the funding base there has grown tremendously," said David Lineback, director of the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the University of Maryland in College Park. "If you look at the funding for agriculture, you plot it out or look at any of the data that come out, funding for agriculture research has been pretty flat since about 1973."
The new institute -- named the National Institute for Food and Agriculture in a July 2004 USDA report on the idea -- would focus on long-term research in five areas: agricultural competitiveness, nutritional improvement, new products, protection of people, animals and crops and improvement of the relationship between agriculture and the environment. That report had suggested NIFA become part of the USDA, but kept administratively separate so it would develop an independent culture.
Keeping the institute separate would be necessary to protect its research money from competing programs and goals at the USDA, proponents argue. It would also support a different approach to research that is more explorative and long term.
"The USDA is a very challenging organization right now; USDA has all sorts of programs to support food subsidies or agricultural subsidies for farmers, and so on," said Howard Gobstein, who directs the Washington office for Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Gobstein, who also noted there were many immediate state needs, told United Press International that the USDA tends to focus on more near-term projects with smaller grants. Some of the funding it provides is handed out on a per-state basis, instead of through competitive selection. The vision for the new institute, he said, would be for long-term research awarded on a competitive basis. The grants would be coordinated with existing programs at the USDA, however, to minimize duplication.
Senator Kit Bond, R-Mo., agreed with the idea of keeping a new institute separate, but he took it a step further. In a bill he sponsored at the tail end of 2004, Bond proposed establishing a Division of Food and Agricultural Science as part of the National Science Foundation. He envisioned the same work plan for the NSF division and for NIFA and also proposed building its research budget up bit by bit to $1 billion annually at the end of five years. He plans to present the bill to Congress again this session, though the details and timing have yet to be set.
"He is definitely reintroducing it," said Shana Stribling, a spokeswoman for Bond.
In addition to the five areas of research described above, both Bond and the USDA see the new institute doing research aimed at aiding national security by improving the lot of subsistence farmers and reducing political instability. There also is a need, they said, to protect agriculture from attacks by bioterrorists.
If these tasks sound familiar, however, it is because they are. Much if not most of the work proposed for the institute actually is already underway somewhere else. Research on drought-resistant, yield-enhancing grain is done in Mexico, with support by some of the same U.S. scientists who helped create the Green Revolution. The same can be said for research into obesity, nutrition and preventing disease in animals.
That does not mean there is no need for more research or that it would not be good to study obesity, for example, with an eye to changing the meat and grains Americans are consuming. It does mean, however, it will be more difficult to justify yet another new organization. This is particularly true now, when basic research is facing cuts across the board under the Bush administration's budget plans. Supporters of an agricultural research institute made it clear they will be interested only if the new institute comes with new money -- not if it robs other programs.
The tightness of the budget should not be a barrier, Gobstein said.
"If you believe that there is a serious national issue, requiring public investment -- in this case in food and agriculture and nutrition -- regardless of the state of the federal budget, you have to get out there and make your case, he said. "What do you do? Do you wait two years? Do you wait five years and hope that the budget gets better?"
--
E-mail [email protected]
