Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 187)
WEDNESDAY 4 FEBRUARY 2009
PROFESSOR IAN
CRUTE, MR
BILL CLARK,
PROFESSOR BRIAN
THOMAS AND
PROFESSOR DAVID
PINK
Q180 David Taylor:
It is a quarter to midnight?
Professor Pink: It is a quarter
to. I think one of the problems we do have as well is that in
the past, again going back to the dim, distant past, MAFF (as
it then was) used to fund PhD studentships, which could be more
applied PhD studentships now. Our PhD studentships now are largely
funded by research councils and there is an internal competition
for them and they have tended to move to more pure science types
of PhDs as well. So there is not the training mechanism there
for young people to come through. The levy boards do fund a small
number of PhD studentships which could be more applied, but there
is not the funding stream for that sort of training at a postgraduate
level.
Professor Thomas: The other component
is the amount of research funding available, so again with university
departments, as research funding has decreased, the number of
departments which offer agriculture courses is decreasing. If
you look at the recent RAE round, I think there were 15 submissions
under agriculture, two of which are actually institutes, or primarily
institutes, so that was 13 and that compared with 17 in the previous
submission. Some of the new ones are very small, like Lincoln
and the University of the West of England. So gradually the research
sector is getting smaller. The amount of courses is smaller. It
is an area which is not so exciting to students. They would get
very excited by biomedical and students with ability will tend
to go that way. I think there is this general, if you like, image
of agriculture and agricultural research which is not, I think,
presented terribly positively and it is not very motivating. So
I think we need to get agriculture and agriculture research, food
production, up the agenda, seen as much more of a positive thing.
Q181 David Taylor:
If you re-balance the research funding available into applied
research, will that not have a serious effect on what you might
call blue skies research? What will happen there? Will that disappear
in its entirety for the short term?
Professor Thomas: Again, I think
it is a balance. I think you can do high quality translational
research. Ian's idea of having central funding, I think that is
okay, but that funder will have to have as its remit to support
agriculture through research, not as one component where you immediately
get into competition with biomedical and other kinds of areas.
Really somebody needs to have that responsibility, that remit
to say, "We are going to move the knowledge system forward
in relation to agriculture."
Q182 David Taylor:
All four of you are to an extent agonising about the ability of
your sector of research really to attract good numbers of students.
You have said that not enough students are coming into the university
system. To go back upstream, what should Government and in particular
perhaps the Department of Children, Schools and Families, together
with others, be doing to alter impressions to encourage a desire
from a younger age for able students to move into your sector
of society?
Professor Crute: I am not quite
as gloomy as perhaps Brian on this one. I actually think that
certainly people of my generation were drawn into this area because
of things like the green revolution and the inspiration that that
provided. I think what has happened over the last 18 months or
so, particularly the whole discussion about natural resource management,
climate change, has actually brought people who have got an interest
in, let us call it the natural world and environment. It has actually
brought young people, I think, into this. What I think we have
to do is take the opportunity of capturing that. Capture it now.
Q183 David Taylor:
Those people who can see the potential of plants and -
Professor Crute: Absolutely, capture
it now. Here is not the right time to discuss it, but Bill and
I are working on the beginning of projects which we think, through
the Regional Development Agencies, ought to be funded to actually
begin to up-skill in certain areas, to try and build back some
of these applied skills. But I think at the more research end
we do see evidence of younger people who want to get involved
with what you can call these grand challenges. The issue, I think,
is the fact that we talk about where we are relative to midnight.
This is actually a ten year project to build back in the UK the
sort of levels of competency and the critical mass. It is going
to be a ten year project and probably we have, I think, about
a couple of years of, let us call it the existing expertise available
to, if you like, take the next generation and actually build the
succession. I think if we don't do it in the next couple of years
then actually we are going to be importing—there is nothing
wrong with it, but we will be importing people from China and
Poland, and what have you. There is nothing wrong with that, but
I think we will not necessarily be building it on the back of
our own institutions. We will be buying it in.
Q184 David Taylor:
You are seeing what you might call the first green shoots of a
renewed interest amongst young potential researchers?
Professor Crute: Because it has
become an exciting and challenging area. When people tell you
that there is enough food in the world and that everybody is complacent,
why would you want to go into it?
Mr Clark: I think there is a degree
of fashion as well in what is happening. I came through the same
thing as Ian. The green revolution excited me. Children now are
excited by GM crops. They are excited about food and security.
But at my centre we have school visits, we have A-level students
who come and do job experience with us, and the kids who come
are fascinated by the science we show them, but when they look
at where the research jobs are, it is all molecular biology and
it is all genomics, and they have to do that. If you want to be
an applied scientist, it is very difficult to see where you are
going to go, so they get sucked into a system. The agricultural
college I went to and the university I went to, they have changed
their courses. They are not applied any more, they have gone down
the environment route because that is what people wanted to do
work on and that's where the jobs were. If you were a molecular
biologist or an environmental scientist, you would get a job.
So it goes right through the system. The kids are interested,
but they will go down where they see a future. So it is up to
us to try and create a possible future for these people who are
excited by the science.
David Taylor: So you think they will
buy a ticket to sing about feeding the world, but when the actual
detail of what they might have to do becomes clear the job may
become less attractive!
Q185 Chairman:
Let me just build out from that because one of the things which
causes me a bit of concern from what you are saying is that if
we do not crack the skills issue you have made some statements,
I think the one I looked at was in Rothamsted, Professor Crute's
evidence, where he says, " ... it should be possible, relatively
easily, with the right incentives to increase output by 50%."
That is why I started off by saying you are in a long-term business
and if you have not got the right skills mix that "easily"
seems to be in doubt. I think it might just be quite useful for
the Committee to know what are the headline technical scientific
issues you have got to crack if we are to be able to get to a
50% increase in foodstuffs from the scientific standpoint? Actually,
have we got the skilled individuals to actually do those things,
because if you do not sort out the issues Mr Taylor was raising
a moment ago the "easily" bit gets deleted from that?
Professor Crute: I think we have
to be clear. It is very easy to use a broad brush and get the
UK and north-west Europe confused with the developing world, et
cetera. The truth is that in the bulk of the developing world,
or in a substantial part of the developing world they have not
enjoyed the fruits of the last revolution really. In India certainly
and China yields are increasing, but I was in India just before
Christmas and it is quite clear that the same issues we are talking
about now they are talking about because obviously they have got
people in the IT industry and getting them into things which relate
to food crops—they have got the same problem with the levelling
off of yields. But if you look at many countries in the developing
world we are really talking about just getting the sorts of things
into place that we would take for granted, which is adequate crop
nutrition in terms of nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium in the
right places. I mean, fertilizer costs in Africa are just unbelievable.
You could not imagine poor farmers in Africa being able to afford
them. There is virtually no fertilizer manufacturing that goes
on in Africa and yet there is energy available. There would certainly
be hydro energy available to do that. Then essentially pest and
disease control, which we take for granted, is something else
involved. So actually the gains which we got really you could
say almost in the 1920s are available if we actually apply today's
knowledge. I think the issue about the future, where you go beyond
it, what we need to be doing is we need to be pushing the envelope
in our part of the world so that to some extent when you are looking
to 2050, the point you were making about doubling, then that is
where we have got to go because we have done a lot in the last
30 years. We have doubled the yields. So I think it is applying
the technology which is already available to us and the knowledge
we already have more effectively in the developing world whilst
pushing the technology in our part of the world. We have not really
mentioned much about land. Of course, one view—I think not
necessarily a well-informed view—would be that we can do
an awful lot just by ploughing more land. I think in the submission
I made it clear that this would really be a rather dangerous thing
to do because at the end of the day that really effectively gets
you into a major exacerbation of climate change in terms of carbon
release and all sorts of other things.
Q186 Chairman:
I was going to ask you, one of the real challenges is can all
this be done sustainably? I know "sustainably" at the
moment has become the buzz word, but somebody came and told me
that one litre of biofuels consumes 9,000 litres of water. I received
that as a piece of information, whether it is true or not, but
it just seem to me that we are pushing the resource—the
land, the soil, the basics—of agriculture and potentially
we are going to push them to the limit. Is there enough of those
resources to go around?
Professor Crute: For me the greenest
and most sustainable way forward has got to be to maximise the
efficiency of the conversion of solar energy into chemical energy
which we use for our own purposes or we feed to livestock as an
intermediate in the process. I used some words of this sort in
the submission. Therefore you take your best land in your most
conducive environments and you essentially do agriculture and
produce food in the most efficient way. That leaves you options
on land in other places for which you use that to provide the
other services. To mix the two things up effectively in my view
is not a green option. It is not a sustainable option. You talked
at the beginning, Chairman, about what keeps you awake at night.
There is another major issue which we have not really talked about
and that is the fact that in the OECD countries of the world,
of which we are part, we have the luxury of having close on 50%
of the productive agricultural land, but we actually have probably
only about 22 or 23% of the world's population. So we can be profligate
with our land. If you look at South Asia and India, China, the
Pacific going down to Australasia, it is almost the inverse. You
actually have close on 50% of the world's population and about
24% of the world's agricultural land. So it seems to me there
are only three options in this scenario. We use our land to produce
food and we move it, or people move, or they produce food by cutting
down rainforests and we re-forest all of the forestation of the
Northern Hemisphere which we removed in order to actually develop
as we did way back. That is a very simple sort of synopsis in
one sense, but it brings into focus the importance of land as
an entity and the efficient use of land and actually the fact
that we do not value it, neither do we value in North West Europe
the fact that we are actually in extremely favoured environmental
conditions, probably getting more favourable with climate change
and we have an obligation on two counts. One is to make sure that
we do produce food because actually we are going to become very
important globally in food production and we should not ignore
that. The second is to produce, as we said earlier, the technology
which will allow others to produce food more efficiently.
Q187 Chairman:
Professor Pink, a closing comment.
Professor Pink: This goes back
to the comment that there is a definite tension there about a
coherent policy and taking account of what effects different policies
have. For example, the Countryside Stewardship Scheme is a blunt
policy because you are actually valuing the environmental benefits
you are getting, whether it is grade one land or poor land. In
actual fact, as Ian says, you take out your grade one, your best
land, out of that sort of thing because that is not what you want
it to do. You want it to produce food. It is the other parts that
you need to actually address your environmental policy to and
it is that sort of cohesion between different Government policies
that does not seem to be there.
Chairman: Well, gentlemen, if we could
have carried on around a dinner table we could have had, I think,
an even more exciting conversation than we have had, but what
you have said has been very helpful and stimulating and I think
has given us an awful lot to reflect on, certainly from the scientific
perspective. At this stage in our inquiry we are looking to say
what are the challenges, what are the things we have got to deal
with, and you have certainly helped us answer some of those questions,
so thank you very much for your oral evidence and also for your
written contributions. They are very much appreciated.
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