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Academics and consumer advocates are getting a little worried about how this country funds agricultural research.
According to an Associated Press article in the Washington Post:
A recent study by Food and Water Watch, a Washington-based environmental group, shows that nearly one-quarter of the money spent on agricultural research at land-grant universities comes from corporations, trade associations and foundations, an all-time high. Financial support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture accounts for less than 15 percent, the lowest level in nearly two decades.
According to the article, Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety, said that the corporate money does not unduly influence the direction of the academic research.
“Industry does not tell me how to spend that money,” he told the Associated Press. “But I ask the industry, ‘What are the areas you are interested in?’”
That’s part of the problem, says Food and Water Watch. As the organization’s report put it, extensive corporate funding of agricultural research “discourages independent research that might be critical of the industrial model of agriculture and diverts public research capacity away from important issues such as rural economies, environmental quality and the public health implications of agriculture.”
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surlybastard on June 08, 2012 3:02 PM:
We should certainly be cautious of corporate funding, as recent biomedical scandals have revealed. There may be expectations, implicit or explicit, for certain kinds of results. This should also be a guarded against in agricultural research, but from the content of the article, this is not yet a problem.
With regard to the guidance and expectations of what to research, the corporate funded research is really not so different than government funded research. If you apply for a grant from NSF, NIH, DOE, or DOA, you are going to write a proposal of what you hope to study, and you will need to make a persuasive argument for why what you want to study is novel and relevant. They are no more interested in funding "sky's the limit" basic research than the corporations are.
That isn't automatically a "bad" thing. The pressure for your research to branch out in "sellable" directions forces scientists to periodically self-evaulate what they are doing, what their colleagues are doing, and where the field is going. If you look at mid and late career researchers who have "given up" on trying to get grants, you will often find people who are researching variations on a theme of what they did 20-30 years ago. In general, this is not productive and does not advance the field.
The danger of this grant pressure, to continually look for something new, is that trends and fads will drive the research agenda, rather than curiosity. So there's probably no perfect solution.