By the start of the twenty-first century, rich countries were spending barely 1.8 cents in every science dollar on agriculture, so unimportant had food become to them.
This line from Julian Cribb's book The Coming Famine puts a highlighter through the shameful neglect of agricultural science since about 1980, only a decade after the Green Revolution had helped India to meet its basic food needs for the first time. As Cribb notes, the "outstanding success of the Green Revolution...also contained the seeds of its own undoing". Fat and happy, we let the research machine we'd built to overcome hunger rust away in the field.
For over thirty years, funding for agricultural research has progressively contracted taking the number of scientists working in this field with it. "A gaping deficit in the river of knowledge and technology on which farmers depend to maintain growth in food production has opened up, which could take decades to fill," writes Cribb.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has recognised this neglect and is putting more funds into CGIAR than many governments. Politicians across the developed world need to have the blinkers torn off. They need to follow the Gates example and reinvest in agriculture while food is still an afterthought in rich countries. Reinvigorating the research machine will take time, so run down have we allowed it to become.
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