Comparing apples and potatoes on research funding

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Gerry Ritz says ag research funds have increased 15 per cent since 1994. His critics say public funding of agriculture and food research in Canada has fallen quite sharply. Who's right?

by BARRY WILSON

In the history of the bizarre debate about the level of agricultural research funding now compared to then (pick your date), no day stands out more starkly than May 3, 2012.

On that day, a letter from agriculture minister Gerry Ritz was published in a newspaper (albeit written several weeks before) which asserted that Conservative spending on agricultural research in fiscal year 2010-11 was 15 per cent higher in real terms than it had been in 1994.

The years of comparison are key in the debate. The Grain Growers of Canada farm lobby has been arguing that, to return to 1994 levels, the year before the deficit-fighting Liberals eviscerated government spending including Agriculture Canada and research, the present government would have to double the research budget over the next decade. Ritz said they were wrong.

Audited numbers from 1994-95 show that agriculture department research spending was $261 million and that included the food inspection service. Adjusted for inflation, that is $350 million in 2012 dollars, said the minister.

Now, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA)  is a stand-alone agency and, in 2010, it spent $140 million in its "science branch," bringing the total to $412 million between the two. "This is a 15 per cent increase over 1994-95 spending in today's dollars," wrote Ritz.

Whether CFIA science branch spending counts as agricultural research is a question but for the government, case closed.

The same day the letter was published, former senior Agriculture Canada bureaucrat Doug Hedley, now executive director of the Canadian Faculties of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, was on Parliament Hill at the Senate agriculture committee with a starkly different story.

"Since the mid-1980s, public funding of agriculture and food research in Canada by government has fallen quite sharply," he said. Spending "levelled out" after the late 1980s. "We are down substantially in real terms from where we were in mid-1980s," said Hedley.

In his day, he was a key Agriculture Canada player with vast inside knowledge about policies and the process. These days, he is paid by academic researchers to keep track of stuff like this. So who is to be believed?

There should be nothing as simple as comparing numbers and numbers now to settle the argument.

Agriculture Canada officials have said that, because the books are kept differently and the research budget (once a separate branch of the department) now includes spending not included in 1994, it is impossible to compare.

What Hedley and his university employers, as well as Ritz critics, are talking about is money spent on basic 'what if' research that leads to foundational breakthroughs that become the springboard for products, varieties and inventions of the future.

In current government terms, the emphasis is more working with industry in "clusters" where industry decides products they need in a two-to-five-year cycle, throw in some money and get to work on a commercial product.

Hedley says the real timeline for basic research, which may or may not produce breakthroughs but could become the base for the next generation, is up to 15 years, ­ a time frame no investing company would contemplate.

So the answer to the debate is that, in some ways, the two sides are comparing apples and potatoes.

Wait, current short-term research investment goals don't contemplate long-term research into the differences of apples and potatoes. BF
 
Barry Wilson is a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery specializing in agriculture.