A national coalition of farm and commodity groups is being organized to lobby for a greater federal government commitment to basic research.
Grain sector representatives appearing on Parliament Hill March 24 complained that research is underfunded, too short-term and too much focused on quick market return.
“On the public research front, this is probably the one area where we have seen complete solidarity right across producer groups from Canada and across all the commodity groups in Canada,” Grain Growers of Canada president Doug Robertson told MPs.
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The coalition will work with the Western Grains Research Foundation, he added.
While private companies invest in corn, soybean and canola research because of potential high returns from genetically modified seed sales, he said, little private money is spent on developing better varieties of other grains.
“Crops like wheat, barley, oats and peas must have public research as their chief research base,” Robertson said.
“In many cases, producers have checkoffs on those crops and they’re willing to contribute to research funding but we need the federal government to step up and be an even bigger partner in this critical area of competitiveness.”
He said there is serious concern “that when the current group of plant breeders retire, they’re not going to be replaced and their programs will die with them.”
Brian Otto, president of the Western Barley Growers Association, said Ottawa must provide more money and recognize that funding has not kept up to inflation.
“We can’t continue to withdraw money and re-allocate it to other areas,” he said. “Producers have stepped up to the plate, we have checkoffs in place to support research, but we need the government to show their support for it.”
Grain growers executive director Richard Phillips said Agriculture Canada researchers are concerned they are being pushed to do research that can quickly be commercialized.
“Core agronomic research must be done as well,” he said.
There were complaints about underfunded laboratories and the inability to get long-term funding commitments for varietal research that takes many years.
Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter said he supported the calls for more research commitment.
“Our research seems to be short-term,” he said.
“We are still living off the benefits of the public research that was done in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was a shot in the dark often but it was paid for by the public.”
It is difficult to calculate exact federal support for research and to compare it to previous years because government spending estimates tabled in Parliament no longer include a line on research spending. Instead, it is scattered throughout various budget lines or combined with topics such as “innovation and adoption.”
However, critics insist the reduction in the value of government support for long-term research is evident and debilitating.
They often date its origins to the 1995 deficit-fighting Liberal budget that sharply cut the department’s programs including research.
To compensate for the loss of government funding, then-agriculture minister Ralph Goodale introduced a Matching Investment Initiative that made public dollars available when the private sector put money up first.
