Climate change – good news for agricultural research?

The agricultural research drought - in need of a little climate change?

This morning, office banter here at CABI turned to the post 9/11 affliction that affected newspaper and magazine columnists for many months, if not several years, after the event. For quite some time it seemed almost impossible to read a  Sunday supplement without some hack, under pressure to sell advertising space, relating the events of that day to whether grey was the new black, if school league tables were good for children's' education, or if there were a lot of pansies at the Chelsea Flower Show that spring.

The phenomenon was also rumoured to have spread as far as research grant application forms, along the lines of 'post 9/11 the world is on high alert for biological agents that could be used in acts of terrorism. It is therefore imperative that we study the effects of….' you know the sort of thing.

I don't know if it's just me, but climate change now seems to be the new 9/11.

This conversation sprang to mind again this afternoon, when one of this month's devastating natural disasters cropped up in a New Scientist editorial this week - the issue (dated 17th May) which I managed to surreptitiously redistribute to my desk this afternoon in time to flick through with a nice cup of tea. 'Burma shows we must invest in farming science'¹, pointed out that the country's suffering in the wake of cyclone Nargis can be partly attributed to the Burmese government's ruthless exploitation of high global rice prices² to continue to make a killing on the world market despite widespread starvation at home. The UN is understandably concerned that providing food aid is going to be a costly exercise if farmers cannot get back to their devastated fields in time to plant the next rice crop.

Added to this, explained New Scientist, is a woeful under investment in the science and infrastructure of farming - not just in Burma, although this is cited as an example, but all over the farming world. Since the leaps and bounds of the 1960's and '70's that generated grain surpluses, the author implies that funding had all but dried up, though any subscriber to CAB Abstracts or its comprehensive, specialist datasets covering crop production or animal science would tell you, this is not strictly true.

However, in the light of climate change, what we might see is, not a sudden turnaround in the magnitude of the research spend, but more likely a change in the direction the technology is heading…and with it the almost inevitable wording of grant applications.

¹'Burma shows we must invest in farming science'. Editorial, New Scientist, 17th May 2008, p. 5.

²As fellow blogger Christina explained so clearly a few weeks ago.