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http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100331/full/news.2010.165.html?s=news_rss
Financial donors wrangle over global research group’s strategy.
Natasha Gilbert
Financial donors to a global network of 15 agricultural research centres want changes to the way the influential group plans to reshape its research programme. The tensions, voiced at a conference in Montpellier, France, raise questions over future funding for the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR), which supports thousands of scientists working on agriculture and food security in developing countries.
Debate over the CGIAR’s future direction and funding reforms is a key part of this week’s Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development, where the world’s major agricultural research funders, scientists and research users, including farmers, are thrashing out a new direction for the area, helping to set national and international research agendas.
The CGIAR is expecting its centres’ combined budget to increase from about US$500 million today to $1 billion in five to ten years. The lion’s share of that funding comes from financial donors that include government agencies in the United States and United Kingdom, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But donors have yet to make firm commitments to the budget increase — which hinges on wide-reaching organizational changes voted for in December 2009, and on a new research strategy currently up for discussion. The Montpellier conference marks their first chance to influence the CGIAR’s research plan, a key draft of which was released on 20 March.
Agricultural strategy
Under the proposed reforms, donor contributions would go into a common pot, which would then be distributed among eight broad research areas, or ‘mega programmes’. These include ‘climate change and agriculture’ and ‘mobilizing agricultural biodiversity for food security and resilience’. (By contrast, donors currently fund individual centres directly, either through specific projects or as a lump sum.) The idea is to cut out research overlap between centres, create a clear mission and refocus research on the questions and problems donors want tackled.
Donors say that they want this reform process accelerated, and to see more flesh on the bones of the outlined research proposals. In particular, they want to see three fast-tracked research programmes launched by the end of the year, including one on the impact of climate change on agriculture, says Jonathan Wadsworth, senior agricultural research adviser to Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID).
DFID is one of the centre’s largest donors, and has said that it wants to double funding to the group in future. But Wadsworth told Nature that funding hikes will depend on the reforms, and on the centres achieving their research targets. “As the reforms speed up, funding will increase,” he says.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private foundation, contributes around $80 million per year to the CGIAR’s budget and has committed funding to the centres until 2013. Prabhu Pingali, deputy director of the foundation’s agriculture development division, says future commitments will depend on the centres focusing their research on a core set of well-defined problems that need to be tackled, rather than the proposed broad programmes.
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