Last weekend, after the UK and Brazil co-hosted an international conference on nutrition, Downing Street announced that £2.7 billion has been pledged to help improve nutrition for children and pregnant women in the poorest countries between now and 2020.
The UK led the way with a promise of at least £375 million in additional funding. The European Commission promised $533m (£343m) subject to ongoing budget negotiations, Germany pledged $260m, the Netherlands $171m and Ireland $169m. Businesses and charities also contributed to the £2.7bn, with the Gates Foundation promising to spend $863m.
The conference was called Nutrition for Growth: Beating Hunger Through Business and Science. Despite that, science will only see a fraction of the funding; most of it will be spent on primary interventions. There is a good reason for this: the donors say they can save the lives of 1.7m children before 2020, and that means there is little time for the longer-term work that science typically needs in order to get a result.
To be fair, science wasn’t completely ignored. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council will in 2014 convene an international workshop on biofortification, the use of genetic and other methods to modify staple crops with important nutrients. This is the same technology used to produce Golden Rice, enriched in vitamin A.
The donors also announced the creation of a Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems. Little information is available yet, but our guess, judging by the panel’s title, is that this body is likely to comprise eminent researchers charged with some kind of reviewing or advisory function.
Notwithstanding these two examples, science has been toppled from its once-lofty perch at such gatherings—continuing the trend of the past two decades in which government funding and human capacity for research in the agricultural sciences has been undermined.
The twin reasons for this, though well documented, are worth repeating: first, the food-rich governments of Europe withdrew from agricultural R&D, channelling more funding into environmental protection. Whatever agri-research was needed, they figured, would be carried out by industry. This was correct, up to a point. But what governments forgot (or ignored) is that the knowledge generated by the world’s great public agriculture research systems was free for anyone to use. That is not always true of industry-funded work, as Ingo Potrykus, the inventor of Golden Rice, found when technologies he wanted to use were protected by patents.
Second, research that focuses on the needs of farmers is often too local in scale to be rated as 3* or 4*, and is unlikely to appear in top journals, so university departments are not eager to support the work. In one tragic case, it has meant the closure of the world-renowned Wye College in Kent, after it became part of Imperial College London.
The UK has an opportunity to make amends in the government’s much-anticipated strategy for agricultural technology. Advanced science might not be needed to make a difference to the world’s undernourished before 2020. But it will make a difference to future generations, and we owe it to them to rectify the mistakes of the past.