U.S. spending on agricultural research has flat-lined and jeopardizes American standing as a leader in ag innovation while Brazil, China and India together out-spend the United States 2-to-1, according to a briefing paper by two University of Minnesota researchers. The paper calls “for a doubling of such spending over the next eight to 10 years to assure that U.S. agriculture maintains its global competitiveness.”
Sluggish U.S. funding “suggests a creeping policy and political complacency about the long-term implications of this trend,” write authors Philip Pardey and Jason Beddow in a paper commissioned by the Farm Journal Foundation. “The overall pace of U.S. agricultural productivity growth has been slowing in parallel with the decline in public agricultural R&D spending, while the pressures to address evolving agricultural pest and disease problems with increasingly constrained land and water assets are growing … Failing to reverse these R&D funding trends is an unacceptably risky scenario for the United States.”
The federal government allotted $2.6 billion for ag research in 2016. State governments also provide funding, often matching funds for joint research. Ag research commonly is credited with a 20-to-1 return on funding, but research perennially is a low priority when government budgets are set.
Pardey and Beddow suggest a variety of steps to secure more funding, saying their proposed doubling of support should be underwritten by federal and state taxpayers as well as the agricultural sector. They include a realignment of farm bill priorities to direct more money to research, a requirement for states to provide a larger share of research spending, a streamlining of the research network, and a suggestion for the equivalent of a farmer-funded checkoff program for ag research. A “research levy scheme” would be similar to a successful Australian project launched in the 1980s, they said. Pardey was to discuss the paper at a Capitol Hill briefing today.