After years of gradual increases in funding, the administration will seek $700 million for the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative in the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1, said White House science advisor John Holdren. If approved by Congress, it would double the funding for AFRI, a competitive grant program for agricultural researchers. “The United States leads the world in agricultural productivity and efficiency,” said Holdren. He pointed to estimates that each $1 in ag research returns $20 to the economy. “With that sort of result, we need to keep doing it,” Holdren told reporters.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the AFRI proposal would allow an overall increase in USDA funding of ag research in the new fiscal year. It also would be the first time that AFRI funding reaches the level authorized by Congress. During a teleconference, Vilsack said other, more immediate demands for money as well as efforts to curb the federal deficit prevented full funding of AFRI in the past. “It is high time we met the threshold of $700 million for AFRI,” he said.
Vilsack also announced $30 million in AFRI grants for 80 projects across the country, including $3.4 million for work on bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
During a teleconference, Vilsack hinted the administration’s fiscal 2017 budget would again seek cuts in crop insurance funding. “There are some ideas that we think are good policy,” Vilsack said. A year ago, the administration proposed that farmers pay a higher share of premiums on policies that pay indemnities on the harvest-time price of a commodity if it is higher than the price that was guaranteed at planting. The government pays an average 62 cents of each $1 in premium. It wanted to reduce the subsidy on “harvest price option” policies by 10 percentage points.
USDA spends around $2.5 billion a year on agricultural and food research, split between federal scientists, universities and competitive grants.