The world’s largest farm exporter and a leader in agricultural innovation, the United States, has been supplanted by China, by a 2-to-1 margin, in terms of public funding for agricultural research and development. Chinese ascendancy came in part due to a decline in U.S. funding, which “may have negative implication for agricultural productivity” when dealing with new pests and diseases and climate change, say three USDA economists.
“In simple dollar terms, the decline in public-sector funding has been more than offset by a rise in private research spending, and stronger intellectual property rights and access to new markets are likely to continue bolstering private-sector R&D,” write economists Matthew Clancy, Keith Fuglie and Paul Heisey in USDA’s Amber Waves magazine. “Yet, public research and private research are not substitutes. Rather, they are complementary ingredients to the nation’s agricultural innovation system.”
“The effects of a decline in public agricultural R&D are likely to become more pronounced over time if the pace of fundamental advances in agricultural sciences slows … Slippage of U.S. funding in agricultural R&D also carries implications for U.S. engagement with the global research community. Many of the scientific and technical constraints facing agriculture are shared among countries and regions, and the U.S. has long played an important role in pushing out the scientific frontier needed to address these global challenges.”
Like the United States, China is one of the agricultural powers of the world while also the No. 1 customer for U.S. farm exports. Its surging role in research and development comes at the same time U.S. companies have complained of difficulty in getting China to approve imports of new GE strains and the Trump administration has threatened stiff tariffs on Chinese products. State-owned ChemChina has struck a deal to buy Swiss-based Syngenta, a leading seed and ag chemical company.
Of course, the United States remains a powerhouse of research. It is still a leader in agricultural science publications and in citations – an indication of high-value research – and agricultural patents. The U.S. share of publications and citations was the largest in the world early this decade but was notably smaller than in 1996.
Two things occurred in the past decade that re-shaped the U.S. role in agricultural research: The new, dominant role of privately funded research domestically and the decision by China to ramp up its government spending on ag research. Both were aided by retrenchment in U.S. funding, ending a long era in which the U.S. public sector was “the largest performer in agricultural R&D worldwide,” say Clancy, Fuglie and Heisey.
Now, the public sector provides a quarter of the funding for agricultural R&D in the United States, some $3.8 billion in 2013, while nongovernment funding totaled $12.4 billion. The money is spent in different areas. The private sector performs almost all of the research into food and feed manufacturing and farm machinery and engineering. Public-sector funds are funneled toward nutrition and food safety, environment and natural resources, economics, statistics and policy, and social development.
Public funding of agricultural R&D began drifting downward at the state level in 1991, followed a decade later at USDA. The decline began to accelerate in 2009, mirroring a downturn across the federal agencies.
From 1990-2003, the United States led the world in public funding of agricultural R&D, although its share of spending diminished. “This decline was driven by a combination of falling U.S. spending and rapidly rising spending in developing countries such as India and, especially, China. Indeed, Chinese government spending on agricultural R&D rose nearly eightfold in real (inflation-adjusted) terms between 1990 and 2013, surpassing U.S. spending in 2008, write the economists. They peg Chinese spending at well above $9 billion in 2013 while the U.S. total was less than $4.5 billion.