Lack of strategic leadership | Ottawa’s cuts to research funding will drive scientists to other countries, warn researchers
Long-term public agricultural research is seriously underfunded, federal granting bodies downplay its importance and as a result, Canadian agricultural productivity is low, university researchers said last week.
In a scathing assessment on the state of research delivered May 3 to the Senate agriculture committee, representatives of Canadian university agriculture faculties said there is a lack of Agriculture Canada leadership and too much short-term thinking, bureaucracy and neglect.
Agriculture Canada has sharply reduced funding for research “clusters” and the National Research Council is moving to short-term research projects, Peter Phillips of the University of Saskatchewan told senators.
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It is driving many researchers to look to other countries where governments understand the need for long-term funding, he added.
“As a person who lives in the research world, even though I have a permanent salary, I spend about 40 percent of my life negotiating contracts in and out — not doing any work, just complying with paperwork of systems.”
Phillips said 65 percent of the world’s research and development funding for technological advance comes from the public sector.
“You cannot do it without the pubic sector, yet there is a mentality in not only national policy but also international policy that the public sector is the problem (and) if they just got out of the way, the private sector could make this go,” he said.
“That is not true in the agri-food field.”
Private sector research investments need a return within a few years, he said.
Former senior Agriculture Canada bureaucrat Doug Hedley, now executive director of the Canadian Faculties of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, said public funding for agricultural research is below relative levels of the mid-1980s.
He said the federal government should divert one percent of payments to farmers into research budgets.
In 2011-12, direct payments to farmers were an estimated $1.55 billion from Ottawa.
“Think about what would happen if just one percent of that went into research money to the agriculture and food sector,” said Hedley.
“That’s $15.5 million per year. Take just one percent and you have a major program for research in the agricultural sector.”
Hedley also complained that although the legislative authority for national voluntary checkoffs for research and development has been available since 1992, only the cattle industry has embraced the idea. Farmers must be part of the solution to under-funding, he said.
Michael Trevan, dean of the University of Manitoba’s faculty of agricultural and food sciences, told senators that in the almost eight years since he moved to Canada from Great Britain, there has been a decline in collaboration between scientists in government, universities and the private sector, usually the result of barriers put up by their institutions.
Phillips said the lack of federal leadership is a bottom line issue.
“For whatever reason, the federal government has sort of denuded its strategic leadership in all of its scientific enterprise, particularly in the agri-food space,” he said.
“The idea that you don’t need leaders any longer and that everyone should be team players is fundamentally flawed.… When this department was successful, and the agri-food department has been successful in a variety of ways, it was always because it had leadership. Ag Canada needs leadership.”
