Examination of Witnesses (Questions 139
- 159)
WEDNESDAY 4 FEBRUARY 2009
PROFESSOR IAN
CRUTE, MR
BILL CLARK,
PROFESSOR BRIAN
THOMAS AND
PROFESSOR DAVID
PINK
Q139 Chairman:
Gentlemen, having seen that you sat through the previous exchanges,
I think it will give you a flavour of some of the areas of our
interest. We are grateful for your interest in what we are up
to. Can I formally welcome from Rothamsted Research Professor
Ian Crute, the Director, and Mr Bill Clark, and from Warwick HRI,
Professor David Pink and Professor Brian Thomas. I remember with
pleasure visiting HRI Wellsbourne some years ago. I think when
I was a minister I opened a new refrigerator complex. I hope it
is still there, playing its part. I find it very fascinating and
I remember at the time I was given a little paperback book on
vegetable growing, which I can still say that I use to considerable
effect on my allotment! So you can see you have already played
a significant part in my own horticultural experience and I may
have a few questions after we finish formally taking evidence
because I have still got a few challenges to talk to you about!
Let us move on to our questioning. You are all in the science
field and I think you will have gathered from our previous witnesses
the importance which they attach to science playing its part in
dealing with some of the massive problems which our growing interest
in food security has given rise to, but I wonder if you might
sort of confide in us if you have those occasional sleepless nights
and there is something that really worries you at the back of
your mind when you are thinking about the challenges of science
and food security. What are the things which cause you the most
worry?
Professor Crute: Do you want me
to go first?
Q140 Chairman:
Yes, as you looked as if you were thinking, "I know the answer
to that question."
Professor Crute: I am not sure.
For me, I think actually you were talking earlier on about the
2050 horizon over the 2030 horizon and if you think about it that
actually is not all that far away in terms of scientific generations.
So an individual scientist motivated to do something, or a population
of scientists motivated to do something, that is like one generation,
so it is actually a very, very near event. So when you are talking
about climate change, which of course we have been doing a lot
of, actually we talk about our children and our children's children.
Actually, I think in this particular area we are going to be talking
about issues which we will confront in terms of the sort of instabilities
which are likely to occur in our lifetime and that actually tells
me how urgent this is.
Q141 Chairman:
I am going to ask the others to respond, but you have given me
a very interesting answer because it goes back to the question
I was asking earlier about how you deal with the short term, because
from my limited exposure to the world you operate in you have
to have, if you like, a combination between some long-term funding
and some short-term juggling on contract activities. I just concern
myself, when you talk about climate change, the long-term nature
of the work with the short-term almost bitty funding streams which
you have to cope with. Have we got the relationship between the
length of time it takes to deal with these big scientific issues
right in relation to the funding streams to sustain that kind
of work?
Professor Crute: I do not think
it has ever been different that science has been funded on, you
might say, bursts of funding. Every scientific organisation, certainly
for as long back as you can think, has been reviewed on a sort
of four or five yearly basis. Grants have been given on three,
four, five years. I think what is different is the fact that we
have actually got ourselves in recent times, perhaps the last
15 to 20 years, certainly the last 15 years, a bit addicted to
the notion that actually what science is trying to deliver is
like a gold medal at the Olympics. It is actually hitting some
sort of high profile paper and therefore actually those are the
sorts of motivations. I think we have got to return to the notion
that actually we are talking about a long-term challenge. It is
a coordinated approach which is going to involve a lot of people
against some targets which need to be clarified and therefore
actually, although the funding side of things has obviously got
to be secure, it is not the staccato bit of the funding, it is
actually the long-term vision and the notion that actually we
are talking about long-term goals with some very clear outcomes
as distinct from just simply some rather, let us call it emblematic
discoveries.
Q142 Chairman:
Now, Professor Pink, you have had plenty of time to think of the
answer!
Professor Pink: I guess my concern
would be—and I think it was referred to by the previous
witnesses—that we do have a very good science base in this
country and I would say that our science bases tend to move very
much more away from applied science, and I think that is one of
the problems we have got and the fact that we have had an erosion
of applied scientists who can translate the results of scientific
research into practical outputs which can then be used on farms
by farmers and growers. We have lost or there has been an erosion
of certain sectors of our science base, agronomists and people
like that. I think you can see that in some of the statistics.
If you look at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany variety
trials for things like oilseed rape, the yields in those trials
are going up. So the genetics is being improved but the national
yield in the UK is flatlining, so we are not making use of the
improved genetics. You can carry out research but if you have
not got those translational skills to get it out to the practical
output, there is a blockage in the pipeline there and that is
something which is going to need to be addressed for science to
be able to answer some of the problems in practical terms.
Mr Clark: That is exactly the
point I was going to make. I am one of these strange people that
Dave was just referring to.
Q143 Chairman:
You are quite normal to me, actually!
Mr Clark: If I give you a little
bit of the background of why I am where I am. I used to work for
Defra many years ago and then I was working for ADAS, which is
the Government advisory service, so I was one of these people
who was taking research from Rothamsted and other research centres,
translating it into practical use and delivering it to farmers
and advisers and the general industry. I left ADAS just under
two years ago to join Rothamsted because I could see—and
this is what I wake up at night worried about—this great
world-class science going on in research centres in the UK which
has impacts all around the world, world-class science, but when
I was sitting here I just wrote down, "It is world-class
science on the shelf" because people are doing this research
and they are doing fantastic research, publishing it and it is
going on shelves. It is a bit like us. If we were the agricultural
industry and we had a group of researchers sitting down in the
foyer doing fantastic research, how are we supposed to know what
they are doing? That is part of the role I am hoping to play in
my new role, to try and get this translation of research, and
it is that joining up which is difficult. That is the most difficult
challenge I think we face, because we have all these problems
which we can identify and there are solutions to some of them
but they are just hidden away.
Professor Thomas: To start with
the sleepless nights, I have been having sleepless nights for
a few years and I guess the thing that has concerned me is that
maybe five years ago I used to give lots of talks to the general
public really about GM. I used to preface it with the sorts of
things we are talking about now, population pressures, pressures
on land, pressures on the environment, the move in the developing
countries from vegetable to meat-based diets. We have had real
challenges and for quite a long time that seemed to be a message
which really had not penetrated anywhere. If we looked at the
priorities for research activities in this country, it was very
much about protecting the environment and food production seemed
to be a non-issue. I have to say that gave me sleepless nights
because it seemed to me it was patently obvious that all the trends
were going to come together and cause problems. So I am very reassured
that suddenly in the last six, twelve months the interest has
shifted, so I maybe have slightly less sleepless nights than I
used to, but of course now I have to factor in extreme weather
and the energy crisis, which again creates the demand for biofuel
crops and things. There are even pressures that I was not talking
about five years ago. So it is the combination of events that
actually causes me sleepless nights because it is very difficult
to predict how they will come together and there was an instance
last year where we had the blip. With regard to the continuity
of funding, I think that is clearly an issue and one of the ways
historically one has got through that is to have institutions
which have a particular remit. These have primarily been the research
institutes. Again, it has been a concern that these seem to be
almost systematically taken apart and the process always seems
to have been that at one stage somebody will have a good idea
and a bit of vision and say, "This is the way we need to
do things. We'll put our resources in to achieve something."
Five years later somebody else comes along who did not have that
idea and who has other priorities and says, "Well, you know,
that wasn't my idea. I'll take the resources and put them somewhere
else." I think the net result, as we have seen over the last
30 years, is that the structure of, if you like, continuous strategic
research institutes which we had have slowly been taken apart.
Recently a couple of these activities have been moved into the
university sector and there I think it seems to be much more difficult
to sustain continued funding. I think that is the challenge, to
retain the skills and the knowledge which has gone into the university
sector which previously sat in the institutes. That is a real
challenge. Although the view and the objectives may be long-term,
as I say, the mechanisms tend to be short-term and tend to be
sidetracked if something more important comes along. Once you
lose the capability, it is very difficult to get it back.
Q144 Chairman:
Can I move, as far as Rothamsted is concerned, to ask you a specific
question? Your submission talked about the need for a national
strategy for delivering genetic improvements to UK major crops.
I would be interested in your observations on what role you felt
the Government ought to have in disseminating and, I suppose,
setting the scope for such an agenda.
Professor Crute: Yes, I think
that comment, Chairman, is to put it into context really in terms
of, if you look at the sort of investment which is going in globally
in the six large multinational companies which we all know, Monsanto,
Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow, the sort of investment they
are putting in would make national programmes and would even make
the US programme or the Chinese programme in one sense begin to
dwarf. So what is the UK going to do? Well, of course, the truth
is with these large corporations they are first of all only interested
in global markets which are able to pay and so in some sense the
developing world is important because it is developing, but it
is not important at this moment in time because it can't pay.
But actually perhaps the more important point is that they are
really only interested in the markets which are essentially for
four major crops—soya, maize, cotton (not a food crop) and
rice potentially—with now a growing interest in what you
might call the sort of high technology, high value horticultural
crops for processing, tomato crops and things of that sort. So
really the point we were trying to make there in the context of
a national strategy for the UK, our major crops—wheat, oilseed
rape, potatoes, the forage grasses which are important in livestock
production, probably also the brassica vegetables and some of
the root vegetables—these are crops which are important
in a maritime climate which we grow well, but actually some of
those crops, particularly the cereal crops and potatoes and oilseeds
are also very important crops globally. They are traded crops
and therefore actually if you are looking for win, wins, there
is a real potential win, win here by choosing to invest in things
which are actually clearly going to be market driven in the UK
and north-west Europe—I can come back to points about why
I think north-west Europe is important—but which also, in
terms of the underpinning science and the routes through which
we will take science to practice, you are doing something which
has global significance as well. So actually to an extent strategically
it plays to the dilemma which I think you were talking through
with the previous witnesses about where does the UK play its role.
The UK has to motivate itself from the point of view of its own
industry, its own food industry, in terms of processing. We are
a wheat and dairy culture and our food processors used these products,
but at the same time we have an obligation globally to deliver
science and the easiest way to do that is to do that from a base,
hence the concept that in a way what we have done over the last
20 years is we have sort of destroyed any integrity in the systems.
As Brian was referring to, we have systematically dismantled some
rather well joined up working systems. Perhaps we can begin to
reassemble them in a different way but against some of the nationally
strategic important areas where this would actually play both
to our own home advantage but also play into a global market as
well.
Q145 Lynne Jones:
Could you start off by exploring where your own institutions research
funding comes from, the sources of your funding, and how that
has changed in, say, the last five years and what effect any changes
in funding have on the type of research you carry out. First of
all, Warwick?
Professor Thomas: We joined Warwick
University about five years ago. Previously we were quite a significant
part of Horticulture Research International. At that time, probably
50% of our funding came from Defra with about 25% also from BBSRC
through a core grant and the remainder, the significant amount,
came from the Horticultural Development Council and then various
sources of competitive grants. When we joined the university,
the BBSRC gave us some continuation funding which has now finished.
We have a strategic contract with Defra which runs until 2012
and that is about 50% of our funding, which is equivalent to about
£5.5 million per year. We now have about £2 million
from competitive BBSRC funding, but three-quarters of a million,
I think, from other research councils. So we have moved to secured
funding from other research councils, EPSRC and NERC. We have
about three-quarters of a million pounds from the HDC, the Horticultural
Development Council, so we have managed to actually sustain, in
fact I think we have slightly increased the amount of funding
we have got from them. Then the rest of the money comes from charities
and various other small industry sources. The main change has
been that we have essentially moved—also, sorry, as far
as Defra funding is concerned, when we joined the University I
guess Defra was still acting as a proxy industry customer and
was commissioning quite a lot of research in relation to production.
Over the last five years the funding has gone very much now towards
environmental protection, desk studies on climate change, protecting
the rural environment, biodiversity. So the amount of, if you
like, practical experimental work, agronomy, that type of work
has decreased. We do not have any strategic BBSRC funding so again
our activities have moved very much towards basic studies, working
on model systems and away from crops. So there has been a move
away. I think we have managed to compete in terms of quality to
keep funding coming in, but it has certainly affected the profile
of what we do.
Q146 Lynne Jones:
So you are unusual in that your funding from Defra has been maintained,
but the type of research they are funding you for is more blue
skies research than translational research?
Professor Thomas: They fund us
to do work which supports their policy development and the policy
objectives have been very much about environmental protection
over the last five years. Interestingly, now we are beginning
to have discussions with them about changing the emphasis to improved
production and adaptation to climate change, which it is related
to.
Q147 Lynne Jones:
When you are discussing your programme, say, with your funders
like Defra, to what extent do your recommendations for what your
priorities should be come into it, or are you just reacting to
what they say they want, or do you say, "No, we think this
is more important"?
Professor Thomas: It depends,
I think, a little bit on the actual topic. Professor Pink can
talk on things like genetic improvement programmes, which have
continued, where we have had quite an input into suggesting ways
in which that can go forward. In other areas such as, if you like,
climate change mitigation, adaptation to climate change, Defra
have consulted internally and decided there are areas in which
they would like research work done and then they come to us and
say, "Can you do something in this area?"
Q148 Lynne Jones:
Do you think Defra are intelligent customers of research?
Professor Thomas: Yes, I think
they are -
Chairman: He has got to say "Yes"
otherwise it will be capped!
Q149 Lynne Jones:
Perhaps I should ask Rothamsted. Could you respond to the same
question?
Professor Crute: The answer is
broadly similar. There are slight differences in the proportion.
Rothamsted at the moment would be a business of about £26
million worth of research and at the moment about £12 million
of that comes in from BBSRC, not exactly as a core grant but it
sort of comes in in large chunks, essentially to sustain what
you might call core competency and then about £5 million
we would win in competition with the universities and other institutions.
So that would mean that about 60% of our funding is coming from
the research council BBSRC. I have been at Rothamsted just over
ten years and when I came to the Institute I should imagine that
about 30% of the funding was from Defra, maybe somewhere round
about £8 million, £9 million, something of that sort.
I could not give you a precise figure. Certainly by 2002/3 it
was about £7 million and I have that figure firmly in my
head, and in the period from 2002/3 to the present we have lost
consistently around about three-quarters of a million pounds a
year, so we are now down to about £3 million. So Defra funding
is now pretty much half what it was just five years ago and of
course, as Professor Thomas has mentioned, the targeting is really
very much, as perhaps it should be, to target Defra policy basically.
If Defra policy is to do with environmental targets, then that
basically is the way in which the work is targeted. I would say
that the impact of this is that essentially we have become, I
think, very competitive in securing funding from research councils
to the extent that what I have been doing really over the last
probably eight or nine years is, sadly, to be showing the door
to people who to some extent were following perhaps some of the
things Bill was talking about, very much in connectivity with
the industry, a good dialogue with the industry but not necessarily
doing research which was, if you like, striking chords with the
Research Council. It was very much translational work, meeting
the needs of industry. For those people effectively funding was
drying up, but of course we were competing for research council
funding, which means that we recruited a whole cadre of people
whose motivations are for all intents and purposes to answer basic
scientific questions. There is nothing wrong with that. It is
probably more on the territory of the universities historically,
but I think it just emphasises something which Bill was saying,
that actually there is a real anxiety here now that we have a
very, very thin veneer of people who really understand what I
would call the needs of the industry. This goes through plant
breeders, people who can do practical plant breeding, plant pathologists,
people who can diagnose disease and understand the introduction
of disease control systems, agronomists you can come up with and
weed biologists. I can tell you that there are probably only about
four weed biologists left in the UK, actually, and some of them
are probably -
Q150 Chairman:
There are plenty of weeds on my allotment, I can tell you that!
Mr Clark: Yes, absolutely, very
important. All I am saying is that if we are talking about a risk
issue—I think you referred to risk with the previous people
giving evidence—one of the risk factors for the UK is that—we
have invested enormously in genomics and in basic science, we
have been extraordinarily successful and we still are actually,
in terms of science citations, at the top of the league, despite
being quite a small country with an agricultural economy which
is not making a huge contribution to the GDP. We are still seen
to be world players, but actually when it comes to the ability
to take that science and translate it into practice, whether it
is through the supply side industries of the corporations in terms
of discovery of new agro-chemicals or what have you, or whether
it is more at the practice end of elevating best practice in agriculture
and horticulture, we have a very thin veneer of people who can
do that now and this is a major risk factor.
Q151 Lynne Jones:
Mr Clark, you explained your new role when you have been brought
in. How are you funded?
Mr Clark: Again, it is in stark
contrast because although I am officially head of a department
of Rothamsted, even though my research centre is geographically
removed from Rothamsted, I run a research centre which is almost,
probably 95% industry funded because it is levy funded from the
Home-Grown Cereals Authority, it is levy funded through the sugar
beet levy. We do work for industry, for BASF, Bayer and DuPont,
all the agrochemical industry. We do work for growers, but it
is all applied because I am the head of the department of applied
crop science. Now, that research is not funded any more by Defra
and it is not liked by BBSRC. All the high science that is going
on at Rothamsted—that is what the BBSRC traditionally have
funded. They do not fund the applied science that I am doing,
so I—
Q152 Lynne Jones:
Does that matter if industry is doing it?
Mr Clark: Well, it matters because
the work we do for industry, the work we do we try to have it
strategically aligned with what Rothamsted's role is, but if BASF
comes to us and says, "We have this wonderful new thing,"
whether it is a variety or a chemical, whatever, and they want
us to work on it, we are essentially working for them. We are
not working for UK growers, we are working for that company. They
may ask us to work on GM beet. It is of no interest to British
farmers. It might be very good for that company in the States.
So it keeps the research going and it keeps people like me, who
are translational people, who are interested in knowledge transfer
and doing the research and putting it into practical use. So it
maintains a pool of people, but that pool of people is dwindling
because there is no Government funding, and even the levy funding
is going down. So there is a danger that we are living on almost
the crumbs from industry, but if we do not get support from Government
that group of people who can do that type of research will be
gone.
Q153 Lynne Jones:
You have said in your submission that the science base needs to
be reconfigured and reconstructed to a considered plan if the
UK is effectively to contribute to resolving the issue of food
security. So how should it be reconfigured and reconstructed?
Mr Clark: From my point of view,
I think Government needs to accept that just—"just"
is a terrible word—doing good science is not enough. That
keeps the UK at the forefront in terms of technology and science
and we can help developing countries and we can help countries
outside the EU, but if you want to do science which has an impact
on social and economic development within the UK you need a group
of people who can do that. So you need to fund the type of research
that those people will do and that type of research generally
is not being funded.
Q154 Lynne Jones:
Who should be responsible for that?
Mr Clark: I think it has to be
a realignment of the BBSRC strategies and Defra and the Government
in general.
Q155 Lynne Jones:
So you really need a longer term horizon for Defra's input?
Mr Clark: Well, we do. I think
at the moment, certainly in the last five, ten years, Defra's
policies have not been about production and production-orientated
research just was not done. As a result of that, we have lost
the expertise.
Q156 Lynne Jones:
When Defra cut its budget when it had financial difficulties and
we had the minister in front of us, he basically said, "Well,
it is not cut because we haven't actually started these programmes."
Is this not a problem when you have a department which has got
other pressures? Would it not be better if all the funding from
Defra actually was put into the science base? Should Defra retain
an interest in funding these kinds of projects, or should it all
be under DIUS?
Mr Clark: I think there is a difficulty
with Defra because of the rate at which their policies change
and inevitably it is like the proverbial oil tanker, it takes
a long time to change the direction of research. In a way we are
living on past glory. To go right back to being about food security
and, as David Pink mentioned earlier on, crop yields, if you draw
a graph of crop yields over the last 40 years you can sit back
quite comfortably. You can see yields going up and up and up.
But if you change the scale and only do it for the last 20 years,
you are in real trouble.
Q157 Lynne Jones:
But you have not answered my question.
Mr Clark: Well, it needs funding
from wherever Government can take it, whether Defra do some of
it, DIUS, BBSRC. I had a meeting with one of the new directors
at BBSRC, Celia Caulcott, who said all the right things. They
were going to be more interested in applied research. They were
not going to sort of leave it on the shelf. They were very interested
in this translational research. So BBSRC are saying the right
things.
Q158 Lynne Jones:
You call for a considered plan. How is that plan going to be developed?
Professor Crute: I do not recognise
the words, actually, that you have mentioned but nevertheless
I will respond to the question. It seems to me—and it comes
back to what the Chairman asked me in terms of national strategy—I
am old enough to know that when I joined this sort of research
activity back in the 1970s this was actually just about the time
of the Rothschild Report and actually there was essentially a
single primary funder and that was the Agricultural Research Council.
It became the Agricultural and Food Research Council. But actually
the changes which Rothschild imposed were not bad particularly.
What they did was they actually said, "We actually really
do want a proxy customer for this particular research because
actually the way the Research Council is taking it is actually
taking it in what you might call too basic a direction and the
industry needs something which is closer too its needs."
So actually the transference of money from the Research Council
into Defra at that particular time was not a bad thing. What I
would like to see is a return to a single primary funder and probably
the truth is that that is probably best in the Research Council
area, but I would not like to see the single primary funder actually
have complete carte blanche over the way in which that funding
was actually delivered. I would actually see a situation where
Defra would expect to continue to be influential as an end user
of that research, as a policy customer, but as an end user also
because of some of the responsibilities Defra holds in a regulatory
framework or in a legislative framework. I think actually the
other thing that needs to happen in this context in terms of the
strategy we are propounding here would be that actually the end
user, not just Defra as end user, but the industry as an end user,
whether the supply side industry in terms of seeds, agrichemicals,
fertilizer, or the growing industry, or even perhaps the advisory
sector, which of course has grown up in terms of independent crop
consultants, who are also transmitting science into practice,
that these end users should actually be influential over the way
in which that budget for science is used. So at the moment—and
I am an employee of the Research Council but I can speak boldly
here—it seems to me that the way the Research Council is
actually constructed is that it is constructed with, you might
say, a token view of having people present who represent sectors
of the industry in the case of BBSRC the pharmaceutical sector,
the agriculture sector, but the dominance of the Council is actually
an academic dominance, which inevitably means it is self-perpetuating
the demands of science. Again, you cannot say it is a bad thing,
but if we want to realign and we want to change priority, we have
to talk to end users. End users have to be involved in the decision-making
process and Defra is an end user and Defra needs to be involved
and it would concern me greatly if Defra was in some sense just
wiped away in this direction. But I do think that we have ended
up—I think the Chairman made some comments earlier on about
this sort of plurality of involvement that is absolutely true—we
have got a whole range of government departments which have an
interest in this. We have several research councils, we have some
agencies of government. So there is a whole plethora of people
and we need greater clarity and the joining up of this is not
just a joining up between funders, it is a joining up of philosophy,
actually, objectives. What is the purpose of the exercise? What
are we trying to achieve? There is not actually a lot of coherent
thinking in this area. I could go on, but I won't.
Q159 Lynne Jones:
Professor Pink was nodding.
Professor Pink: I was going to
make the same point. Defra develops the policy which UK agriculture
operates in, therefore it does need to have access to research
to have evidence-based policy, so I was going to make exactly
the same point that Ian so eloquently made. I think it is important
that Defra does have a role in determining research, whether that
funding is proxy funded through somebody else, but it should have
that input.
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