Professor Douglas Kell is the Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) in the UK and he says that without an additional £100m a year being spent on crop research in Britain, there could be food riots in developing countries as the growing world population fails to find enough affordable food.
Investigating improvements in crop yields is one way that the developed world could help to secure food supplies for the planet as a whole. And, he claims, the UK would see economic benefits from this research investment.
To put the research cost into proportion, Kell says that the £100 million that BBSRC seeks would increase its budget by nearly 50% but is still only around the same as one day’s expenditure on the disastrous Foot and Mouth epidemic in the UK in 2001. This is a timely warning for a world teetering on the edge of panic related to the swine flu or (as US farmers would prefer) H1N1 virus which may soon be declared a pandemic.
He bases his projections on the recent unrest in Indonesia and Mexico related to spiralling food prices and the suggestion that current population increases require food production to increase by 50% by 2030 for everybody to have basic food security. And that increased food supply will have to be produced on the same amount of land and with only the same or reduced oil and water inputs because both oil and water are becoming scarce resources – and will become even more difficult to obtain in many of the marginal agricultural areas of India and Africa where fragile farming communities already live on the edge of malnutrition.
Because the results of agronomic and biological science can take a long time to turn from pure research to applied techniques, Kell says, we need to start now if we are to achieve these increases in anything like the necessary time-scale. And, he adds, because Britain is both an agricultural trading nation and, historically, a country with a strong base in plant science, it is the UK’s duty to lead the way in agricultural research. His comments draw on the strong background the UK has to entrepreneurship in plant science, dating back to the seed drill and ‘plant piracy’ like the smuggling of tea plants and seeds from China to British owned India, to break the Chinese monopoly on tea production.
Ploughed crop field courtesy of nagillum at Flickr under a creative commons licence
