Perils of privatising agricultural research

Devinder Sharma

Food & Agriculture Specialist

AS a young student of plant breeding and genetics, I was fascinated by the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) at Cambridge. By the mid-1970s, this public-funded institute had acquired the status of a world centre for excellence in plant breeding, and subsequently in molecular genetics.

Corporate greed for high profits has grown over the years. Even amid the Covid pandemic, an attempt was made to raise prices for garnering more profits.

Before it was privatised by then PM Margaret Thatcher in 1987, its overpowering performance in wheat research had enabled the institute to cover 90 per cent of the UK farmlands with its crop varieties and occupy 86 per cent of the total cereal acreage. Drawn by the admirable accomplishments, almost every second student of plant breeding in India at that time aspired to be at the PBI for higher studies.

In the quest to privatise agricultural research, this profit-making institute was sold to Unilever for £68 million; later, Monsanto acquired it for £350 million. Subsequently, when a fellowship brought me to the Cambridge University in 1996, I met Sir Ralph Riley, a fellow of the Royal Society, who had been the director of the institute from 1971 to 1978. He later became the Secretary of the Agriculture and Food Research Council, which was responsible for putting public funds into basic farm research. One day, he took me around the sprawling research farms of the institute, stopped his car, and in what was probably a strong expression of his dismay at the privatisation of agricultural research, lamented: “This is where plant breeding died.”

After it was privatised, the world hasn’t heard of any laudable achievement by the erstwhile PBI, whose ownership changed a number of times before it moved to its new location in Essex.

When the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) announced in July its decision to open the doors for collaborative research with private companies, it didn’t come as a surprise. In 2007, the ICAR had acknowledged tremendous possibilities to work with the industry and had called for agricultural transformation through public-private partnership. Collaborative research with the private sector was, therefore, waiting to happen.

Prior to that, the US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agricultural Education, Teaching, Research, Service and Commercial Linkages, signed on July 18, 2005, had created an investment environment for agribusiness. It had laid down the template for public-private partnership and ‘market-oriented’ agriculture.

Working with the industry and taking advantage of its strength in research, marketing and dissemination of technology is one thing, but whether we like it or not, taking up joint research projects will gradually shift research priorities to products and technologies that are profit-oriented. For an umbrella organisation, with one of the largest networks of agricultural research and educational institutes in the world, the challenge instead should have been to lead the way on farm research at a time of climate emergency to fix the broken food systems, thereby setting a research agenda for the private sector to follow.

No matter how the ICAR and the global agribusiness industry may try to justify the collaboration, the private sector has always had its sights on the profits it can extract. This reminds me of what Dr Ismail Serageldin, a former Chairperson of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research — a global consortium of 15 publicly funded agricultural research centres — had said during a visit to India in the mid-1990s. He had explained how no private company was willing to undertake research on cassava, the staple food of Africa. The private sector refrained from research on cassava as it feared that there would hardly be any buyer for the improved seed varieties, given the low income of the largely subsistence farming community. But as soon as some US studies found that cassava could be a good source of feed for the $28-billion pig industry, the industry swung into action, launching numerous research projects.

Simply put, for the industry, pigs became a priority when actually the poor farmers needed research support for enhancing their livelihood security.

Nothing seems to have changed. Corporate greed for high profits has, in fact, grown over the years. Even during the Covid pandemic, an analysis by international charities Oxfam and Action Aid showed global food prices increasing by 14 per cent because of greedflation — a deliberate attempt to raise prices for garnering more profits. With hardly any sensitivity towards billions hit by the pandemic, 18 top food and beverage companies walked away with a windfall profit of $28 billion in just two years, 2020 and 2021. Nine fertiliser companies made a profit of $57 billion in 2022.

To expect the agribusiness companies that made profit from hunger to undertake research projects with ICAR for the benefit of small and marginalised farming communities in India would be a gross folly. In any case, I can’t imagine a massive research infrastructure — 64 central research institutes, 15 national research centres, 13 project directorates, six national bureaus, 63 agriculture universities, four deemed universities and three central universities — seeking the help of the private sector to build research partnerships. It only shows that “the link between science and agriculture” had somewhere got snapped, as Dr MS Swaminathan, hailed as the father of India’s Green Revolution, had once remarked.

Coming after the 2021 withdrawal of the three contentious farm laws and recent news reports indicating how a task force was constituted by the Niti Aayog at the suggestion of an NRI businessman to corporatise agriculture, the ICAR initiative to join hands with private companies for collaborative research seems to point to the underlying intent — privatising the entire farm-to-fork chain. You can be sure the efforts to privatise research will be back in one form or the other to drive the system away from public good.

The ICAR needs to rejuvenate itself and change with the times. Instead of setting up new research centres for fertilisers and pesticides, it must move away from toxic food systems towards regenerative agriculture. Instead of a collaboration with the industry, the ICAR must demonstrate renewed leadership and rebuild public confidence.

At the same time, let’s not forget the classic fable of the camel in the tent.

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