The price of neglecting crop research

Straits Times 14 Jun 08;

Research budget cuts have contributed to a looming world food crisis
THE brown plant hopper, an insect no bigger than a gnat, is multiplying by the billion and chewing through rice paddies in East Asia, threatening the diets of many poor people.

The damage to rice crops, occurring at a time of scarcity and high prices, could have been prevented.

Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute (Irri) in the Philippines say they know how to create rice varieties that are resistant to the insects. However, budget cuts have prevented them from doing so, they say.

This is a stark example of the problems that are coming to light in the world's agricultural system.

Experts say that during the food surpluses of recent decades, governments and development agencies lost focus on the importance of helping poor countries improve their agriculture.

The budgets of institutions that delivered the world from famine in the 1970s, including the rice institute, have stagnated or fallen, even as the problems they were trying to solve became harder.

'People felt that the world food crisis was solved, that food security was no longer an issue, and it really fell off the agenda,' says Irri director general Robert S. Zeigler.

The institute is the world's main repository of seeds, genes and other information about rice, the crop that feeds nearly half of the world's people.

But at Irri nowadays, greenhouses have peeling paint and holes in their screens and walls. Hallways are dotted with empty offices.

In the 1980s, it employed five entomologists, or insect experts, overseeing a staff of 200. Today, it has one entomologist with a staff of eight.

Cutbacks worldwide

SIMILAR troubles plague other centres in Asia, Africa and Latin America that work on crop productivity in poor countries.

Agricultural experts have complained about the flagging efforts for years and warned of the risks.

'Nobody was listening,' says MrThomas Lumpkin, director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico.

Now, a reckoning is at hand.

Growth of the global food supply has slowed even as the population has continued to increase and as economic growth is giving millions of poor people the money to buy more food.

With demand beginning to outstrip supply, prices have soared and food riots have erupted, undermining the stability of foreign governments.

World leaders are scrambling to respond.

On May 1, US president George W. Bush asked Congress for an extra US$770 million (S$1.06billion) to pay for food aid and to help farmers improve their productivity.

But cuts in agricultural research continue.

The United States is in the midst of slashing, by as much as 75 per cent, its US$59.5 million annual support for a global research network that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries. That network includes the rice institute.

Crop by crop and country by country, agricultural research and development are lagging.

The Mexico centre has created drought-tolerant corn for Africa and higher-yielding, disease resistant wheat for South Asia. But it does not have the money to get the varieties into the hands of poor farmers.

In Africa, where yields have remained stagnant since the 1960s, efforts to bolster them have been hampered by cuts not only in research but also in programmes, such as fertiliser distribution.

The biggest cutbacks have come in donations to agriculture in poor countries from the governments of wealthy countries and in loans from development institutions that the wealthy governments control, like the World Bank.

Drastic budget cuts

ADJUSTING for inflation and exchange rates, the wealthy countries, as a group, have cut such donations roughly in half between 1980 and 2006, from US$6billion a year to US$2.8 billion a year.

'Agriculture has been so productive and done so well, people have kind of lost sight of how fragile it really is,' said Dr Jan E. Leach, a plant pathologist at Colorado State University.

'It's as if we have lost track of the fact that food is linked to agriculture, which is linked to human survival.'

Agricultural R&D work is never done. Food demand keeps growing. Insects and plant diseases adapt, overcoming efforts to thwart them.

In the 1960s, population growth was far outrunning food production, threatening famine in many poor countries. But then wealthier nations joined forces with the poor countries to improve crop yields.

Countries such as India and Pakistan embraced new plant varieties, irrigation projects and fertiliser programmes in a vast effort that came to be known as the Green Revolution.

Yields soared and, by the 1980s, the threat of starvation had receded in most parts of the world.

The Green Revolution had led to the creation of a global network of research centres focusing on agriculture and food production, with 14 institutes - including Irri - scattered across Asia, Africa and Latin America, in addition to a research office in Washington.

The centres, known collectively as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, carry much of the burden of improving crop yields in developing countries.

As the world lost its focus on crops, the overall budgets of some of the centres were cut.

Spending fell on the laborious plant-breeding programmes needed to improve crop productivity.

The stage was being set for a food emergency.

In 2004, the world economy began growing more quickly, about 5 per cent a year. As the food supply was lagging, millions of people were gaining the money to improve their diets.

The world began to use more grain than it was producing, cutting into reserves, and prices started rising.

Early this year, as stocks fell to perilous levels, international grain prices doubled or even tripled, threatening as many as 100 million people with malnutrition.

Slow recovery

AT THE World Bank, agricultural funding has begun to recover.

Under new president Robert B. Zoellick, the bank has decided to double its lending to such programmes in Africa.

Other wealthy countries are joining the United States in increasing their support.

But the case of the brown plant hopper shows there will be no quick fix for the years of neglect.

The insect is not a new problem. In the 1960s, Irri pioneered ways to help farmers grow two and even three crops a season, instead of one, one of the critical innovations of the Green Revolution that staved off famine.

But, with rice plants growing more of the year, the hoppers - which live only on rice plants - had longer to multiply.

The institute responded by testing thousands of varieties of wild rice for natural resistance.

Researchers found four types of resistance and bred them into commercial varieties by 1980.

But the hoppers adapted swiftly, and the resistant strains started losing their effectiveness in the 1990s.

An important insecticide lost its punch too as the hopper developed the ability to withstand up to 100 times the dose that used to kill it.

While the insect was adapting, the rice institute was being gutted.

After peaking in the early 1990s, its budget has been cut in half. Several dozen important varieties of rice have been lost from the institute's gene bank through poor storage.

Promising work on rice varieties that could withstand high temperatures and saltier water - ideal for coping with global warming and the higher sea levels that may follow - had to be abandoned in the early 1990s.

A potential solution is at hand for the plant hopper problem.

No fewer than 14 new types of genetic resistance have been discovered.

But with the budget cuts, the institute has mounted no effort to breed these traits into widely-used rice varieties.

Doing so now would take four to seven years, if money can be found.

Meanwhile, the hoppers have become a growing threat.

China, the world's biggest rice producer, announced last month that it was struggling to control the rapid spread of the insects there.

A plant hopper outbreak can destroy 20 per cent of a harvest; China is trying to hold losses to 5 per cent in affected fields.

'We must stay ahead of rapidly evolving pests - and increasingly, a changing climate - to assure global food security,' said Irri's Mr Zeigler.

'Cutting back on agricultural research today is pure folly.'

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE