More spending on agriculture science needed to resolve the world's food crisis

An editorial in Nature: This was not a sudden crisis. It may be only this spring that food prices have started sparking riots on the streets of Haiti and Egypt, not to mention rice rationing at Wal-Mart's cash-and-carry stores, but food prices have been rising since 2000. The rises accelerated in 2006, when global cereal stocks dropped to levels not seen since the early 1980s. And although the factors driving them are many and various, a good few of them look likely to persist for years to come.

Nor is the crisis unremittingly heinous. Higher food prices, other things being equal, mean higher farm incomes, and there are a lot of poor farmers in the world who could do with such a boost. But although this may suggest benefits for some in the future, the net effect so far has been negative. An interim report released by the World Bank in April says that seven years' poverty reduction has been undone by the past two years of high staple-food prices.
The causes of these shortages are not easily undone, and some of them are things no one should want to undo. In China and India there is ever more — and utterly reasonable — demand for a third meal in the day and more meat in the diet. In Australia prolonged drought has had a severe effect on wheat production. High energy prices mean costly fertilizers and insecticides, not to mention making farm machinery more expensive to run. In the United States, more and more corn (maize) goes to making ethanol, raising the price of both corn and other cereals that can substitute for it.

There are various ways in which the fruits of scientific research might have helped ease the suffering that comes from this confluence of factors. But here, too, the harvest is not what it might have been. Public spending on basic agricultural research fell during the 1980s and 1990s in rich countries…

One might assume that such cutbacks in research reflected poor results. Not so; the pay-offs to agricultural research are massive. The World Bank's World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development — the first of the annual reports to focus on agriculture for a quarter of a century, the bank noted with self-reproach — cites 700 published estimates of rates of return on investment in agricultural research, development and extension services in developing countries. It reports an average annual return of 43%...

The hieroglyphs say, "Time to modernize," from the tomb of Sennedjem, 1200 BCE, from the Yorck Project, Wikimedia Commons