Grain Growers of Canada, a conservative national farm lobby, is urging Ottawa to double the agriculture research budget over the next decade to reverse more than a decade of decline.
In a Sept. 16 presentation to the House of Commons finance committee preparing a report on what should be in the next budget, GGC executive director Richard Phillips said since 1994, Agriculture Canada research branch spending has been stagnant with no increase for inflation.
“In 2009 dollars, this means that funding has dropped from $458 million to $280 million today, nearly a 50 percent cut,” he told MPs. “The number of front-line scientists has dropped by more than 10 percent in just the last couple of years.”
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He said Ottawa should add $28 million per year to the Agriculture Canada base research budget over the next 10 years to restore research spending levels that existed in the mid-1990s when the Liberals gutted research in the fight against the deficit.
“This would allow Ag Canada to upgrade labs and equipment, bring on new staff and help ensure proper succession plans for continuity of corporate memory,” said Phillips. “For example, if there’s a plant pathologist retiring who’s been studying plant diseases, it’s really critical that (with) the new person coming in there’s some overlap so as to transfer that knowledge as to what that person’s been working on.”
The issue raised by Grain Growers has been contentious since the mid-1990s when then-finance minister Paul Martin slashed agricultural research spending and substituted an incentive program to attract private sector investment with matching government dollars.
Long-term public research diminished and the emphasis shifted to research projects with short-term payoff potential that private investors would favour.
Sheri Strydhorst from Alberta Pulse Growers told MPs that publicly funded long-term research has produced successful bean and wheat varieties that return hundreds of millions of dollars in market receipts every year.
“Public research has been integral to the success of Canadian farmers,” she told MPs.
The plea for more public investment in agricultural research drew no response from MPs on the finance committee.
However, a Grain Growers proposal that Ottawa offer a tax incentive to farmers who buy certified seed rather than use their own seed drew much MP comment.
The recommendation was that if farmers were encouraged to buy certified seed, it would provide revenue to creators of those varieties, resulting in more investment in mainstream variety research where there now is little incentive for companies to invest.
MPs wondered if the proposal was a way to have tax incentives help creators of terminator seeds or private multinational seed companies.
Phillips said it was a tax incentive proposal that would benefit farmers but also would help any developer of certified seed varieties, including Agriculture Canada and university plant scientists.
