All-Party Parliamentary Group on Science & Technology in Agriculture
Notes of a meeting held on Wednesday 30 January 2013, Boothroyd Room, Portcullis House
Towards a UK Agri-Tech Strategy – Science Minister David Willetts MP
Present:
Members
George Freeman MP (Chair)
Earl of Selborne
Lord Haskins
Sir Jim Paice MP
Lord Curry of Kirkharle
Duke of Montrose
Earl of Lindsay
Guest Speaker:
Rt Hon David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
Stakeholders
Martin Savage, nabim; Caroline O’Leary, nabim; Neil Hipps; Tina Barsby, NIAB; Jennifer Wilson, USDA; Mike Rowe, Defra; Nick von Westenholz, CPA;Rob Edwards, Fera; Martin Collison, Collison Associates; Chris Atkinson, University of Greenwich; James Hallett, British Growers Association; Amelia Tuckett, Lexington;Mike Bevan, JIC; Wendy Gray, CPA; Denis Chamberlain, LaSalle Investment Management; Colin Ruscoe, BCPC; Jayne Brookman, Biosciences KTN; Mark Tatchell, Horticulture Innovation Partnership; Ian Crute, AHDB; Tim Benton, Global Food Security Programme; Jonathan Jones, Sainsbury Laboratory; Maurice Moloney, Rothamsted; Helen Ferrier, NFU; Andy Mayer, BASF; Heidi Cunningham, Syngenta; Chris Cotton, China-Britain Business Council; Claire Urry, China-Britain Business Council; Peter Gregory, East Malling Research; Jenny Stratford, WFU; Clare Wenner, consultant to British Sugar; Hugh Oliver-Bellasis, GWCT; David Leaver, BIAC; Guy Poulter, Natural Resources Institute; Simon Penson, Campden BRI; Simon Clack, ADM; James Dancy, Defra; Alex Chaix, BBSRC; Barbara Gallani, FDF; Vivian Moses, CropGen; Roger Turner, FCRTN; Anthony Keeling, Elsoms Seeds; Ed Barker, CLA; Ionwen Lewis, Women in Agriculture; Mark Leggott, NFU; Ian Munnery, SESVanderHave; Paul Rooke, AIC; Richard Whitlock, AIC; Dave Hughes, Syngenta; Jack Edgeley, BSPB; Penny Maplestone, BSPB; Mindy Dulai, Royal Society of Chemistry; Sam Beechener, ADAS; Paul Biscoe, Agri-Food Charities Partnership; Graham Jellis, BCPC;Frances Downey, Sense About Science; Elizabeth Warham, GO Science; Abbie Lloyd, BIS; Stephen Axford, BIS; Daniel Pearsall, Group Co-ordinator
- Welcome & Introduction
George Freeman welcomed Members and stakeholders tothe meeting, noting the particularly strong turnout and support from stakeholders from across the food, farming, input supply and agricultural research sectors, and from all parts of the UK.
He also welcomed the increasing involvement of Parliamentarians from both Houses in the work of the All-Party Group, reflecting growing political interest in the food security debate and the role of agricultural science in providing solutions. Recent meetings of the Group had focused on the lessons to be learned from examples of best practice around the world in applying scientific and technological innovation to deliver improved agricultural productivity and efficiency, and the importance of agricultural science within the food supply chain. This information wouldfeed in to the government’s Agri-Tech Strategy, building on a consensus throughout the Group that for too long successive governments had failed to recognise the potential contribution of British agricultural science and research,not only in responding to the Foresight agenda of ‘sustainable intensification’, but also in forging opportunities for economic growth at home and overseas.
GF introduced David Willetts as a strong advocate of science, evidenced by the way in which the current government had putinvestment in science and innovation at the heart of the growth agenda despite tight financial constraints on public spending, noting also that the Agri-Tech Strategy was a cross-departmental initiative between BIS, Defra and DfID and with increasing involvement and support from Number 10.
- Guest Speaker:
Rt Hon David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
David Willetts opened by welcoming the timing of the meeting since the government’s Agri-Tech Strategy was still at a formative stage.
DW described a ‘potted history’ of post-War agricultural policy in three stages: beginning with ‘Dig for Victory’ which carried on long after the War and left the UK with an ambitious framework of public sector agricultural research centres and advisory services; followed by a change in the 1980s and 1990s - partly influenced by a shift in economic thinking and partly by the arrival of wine lakes and butter mountains – which resulted in much of this underpinning research and extension activity being deliberately removed; and then more recently a recognition, led by the UK and experts like Professor John Beddington, that food was once more becoming a rare and precious commodity, and the emerging agenda was one of delivering high quality food to a rapidly growing world population, and doing so without creating more environmental damage or using unacceptably high and expensive amounts of energy – ‘sustainable intensification’.
DW acknowledged that he approached this issue not with a background in agriculture, but in science. Throughout these changes, a reasonable level of investment in upstream scientific research had been maintained– notably though not exclusively through BBSRC. The BBSRC budget of £400m pa bore comparison with almost any other country, and the UK had been able to maintain a network of valuable scientific institutes such as Rothamsted, Roslin and the John Innes Centre. But what was lacking was the connection between that upstream research and the wider agricultural community and food industry. One of the main objectives of the Agri-Tech Strategy was to try to rebuild those connections, but in a modern form, relevant to the needs of today’s farming sector.
He referred to a recent interview with historian Peter Hennessy alongside William Waldegrave, agriculture minister in the early 1990s, who had agreed that the privatisation and dismantling of public sector agricultural research establishments had gone too far and that too much of the infrastructure had been lost that was needed to transmit knowledge out more widely.
DW also highlighted the importance of working with Defra and with DfID, which was funding much of the research focused on feeding the developing world.
DW made it clear that while a priority for the strategy was to connect ongoing and future research with the needs of practising farmers, that did not exclude the views and concerns of food manufacturers and retailers, although the strategy was not intended to be a complete agenda for the British food chain.
DW also noted that food retailers and manufacturers could certainly help by promoting agriculture and food production as a hi-tech industry rather than marketing their products as something emerging from some pre-industrial utopia where happy peasants plucked fruit and fresh produce from an apparently untouched rural environment.
In terms of the framework for the strategy, DW outlined the following instruments used in BIS, but which he made clear may not be appropriate for the agri-tech sector.
Seven catapult centres had already been introduced in other industrial sectors – places where public sector funding was used to provide access to research facilities, equipment and business support which would not be affordable to a single enterprise. These centres were roughly modelled on the Frauenhofer Instituteconcept, to allow scaling up of lab-based research to industrial or part-industrial scale, for example to demonstrate the potential applications of emerging science capable of transforming straw into a wide range of valuable substances.
The catalyst fund offered a bridge, or de-risking mechanism, for the medical life sciences sector to help take research funded by the Medical Research Council far closer to market than previously, and was managed by the Technology Strategy Board. The catalyst fund aligned £90m of MRC funding with £90m of TSB funding to provide a clearer route to commercialisation for promising lines of research.
DW asked whether such a mechanism would be appropriate for the agri-tech sector, aligning TSB funding with BBSRC research.
In terms of skills and training, the number of graduates with STEM qualifications in the UK was not out of line with the average for an advanced western country, but because the unit of resource per student had been progressively reduced, UK graduates were not gaining the hands-on practical experience of industrial kit and equipment compared to students in countries like Germany. Recent higher education reforms in the UK had sought to address this issue by increasing the resources available for teaching in universities.
But DW also laid down a challenge to the agri-food industry - if there were concerns about the lack of new scientists entering the sector - to do more to advertise and celebrate the fact that agriculture was a hi-tech, scientific endeavour. He compared apple computer products with the tomato and contended that the modern tomato was as much an achievement of scientific research and innovation over decades as apple products, yet the industry seemed intent on pretending otherwise.
DW also made it clear that there was no additional funding available to support the Agri-Tech Strategy, but stressed that both the Treasury and Number 10 increasingly understood that the industrial competitiveness of the UK depended crucially on the quality of the relationship between the scientific community, business and government. If that three-way partnership started to build confidence and identify opportunities for new investment by the private sector, that would represent a far more persuasive argument to take to the Treasury in terms of co-funding. The Treasury was aware that UK businesses were sitting on £750bn of cash and would like to see it directed into productive investments. Part of the dialogue behind the strategy was therefore to explore where more investment could be unlocked from the private sector.
On the issue of GM, DW expressed his personal view that feeding the world would be achieved through empiricism and rationality, not by campaigns intent on turning back the clock to some fake nostalgic past. It was therefore important to recognise that this was a major scientific and technological challenge. DW highlighted the importance of the wheat 20:20 challenge, raising wheat yields to 20t/ha within 20 years. He noted that currently an above average farm in the UK would be yielding 10 or 11t/ha, while organic farmers not using fungicides would be producing 1 or 2t/ha. It would therefore require a lot of land to feed the world organically. Of course there were a number of routes to achieving 20t/ha, not all involving GM, but clearly GM was one of the most likely breeding tools available.
DW questioned whether the Lord Melchetts of this world would genuinely oppose DfID-funded GM research programmes which would enable Somali farmers to grow wheat. Would his great contribution to well-being in the world be to uproot that research and ensure it didn’t happen? In DW’s view, unscientific opposition to such research was disreputable and should not be allowed to go unchallenged. Led by the scientific community, rather than industry, there was now a much greater opportunity to engage with the public on GM technology in a way that wasn’t possible 10 years ago.
- Questions and discussion
Opening the questions, GF asked about plans for a Leadership Council to draw in expertise from research and industry to work with Government in meeting the objectives of the Agri-Tech Strategy.
DW indicated that there was no prescriptive format for this, but in other sectors it had proved valuable to assembleleading representatives of the producers/industry, the scientists and government – which in this case would involve at least two if not three government departments, BIS, Defra and DfID.
A valuable first project for such a group could be to commission a respected expert to produce a technology roadmap – used successfully with high-performance computing and in the space sector – to describe how the technologies affecting that sector would advance over the next 5-10 years, where the research agenda was heading and the implications in terms of public and private sector R&D investment. Putting cards on the table openly in this way could help identify gaps, overlaps and opportunities. It would also help to highlight industry priorities to the research community.
Sir Jim Paice welcomed DW’s recognition of the importance of farming and food in the future, but expressed concern that this was not yet widely recognised across the whole of government, particularly in relation to the hi-tech nature of modern agriculture. He noted a disjunction between Defra and DfID in recognising the compatibility of much of the research funded by both departments. Stressing the fragmented nature of the farming industry, he also welcomed DW’s acknowledgement that R&D policies in the 1980s and 1990s had led to a collapse in near market research, and highlighted the importance of supporting near-market and applied research as well as the fantastic blue-sky science taking place.
Ian Crute, AHBD, highlighted the need for the strategy and the new Leadership Council to drive greater collaboration and transparency between funding bodies in this area – eg BBSRC, TSB, Defra, NERC, Scottish Government and the levy bodies – to get the best out of the available funding in meeting the goal of sustainable intensification.
DW agreed that sustainable intensification was the way forward, referring to a recent visit to a horticulture research project in Yorkshire which was investigating the use of LED lighting to grow fresh produce much closer together by getting the light spectrum exactly right to encourage maximum growth.
In relation to R&D funding, DW advocated a soft approach by encouraging bodies to share information in the first instance.
Helen Ferrier, NFU, asked how the UK could make better use of EU funds for agricultural research, eg through the Horizon 2020 programme.
DW considered that the UK already did very well out of EU research funding, but would like to do better and would welcome views on how that could be achieved. He also noted that much EU agricultural research funding came under the CAP heading rather than Horizon 2020.
Simon Penson, Campden BRI, highlighted the importance of translational research and investment in skills to bridge the gap between basic upstream research and commercialisation, and asked how this could best be achieved.
DW questioned whether or not this was a particular challenge for the agri-science sector, referring to other sectors where the historic barriers between researchers and the industry had largely disappeared - noting for example that the Jaguar/Land Rover research facility was on the campus of Warwick University. As a result Jaguar/Land Rover did not complain about lack of access to upstream research. That closeness of working did not yet exist in agri-science, although there were some isolated examples,eg Kraft and Cadbury’s sponsoring work at Reading University. But he suggested that more needed to be done to communicate to the agricultural sector that universities were a problem-solving resource.
Jonathan Jones, Sainsbury Laboratory, highlighted the success of the former Plant Breeding Institute in directing fundamental plant science into high-performing varieties. If PBI had been retained, with varieties auctioned to the highest bidder in the commercial sector to offset concerns over unfair competition, then the UK would still have a public sector R&D pipeline which potentially could have earned more legitimacy in the public debate over GM. In recognising that the process of privatising agricultural research might have gone too far, by how much might it be rolled back?
DW agreed that he often heard people talk about the loss of the PBI as a mistake. Although it could not now be recreated, if there were institutions missing from the landscape which could recreate some of those functions, the government would be driven by the evidence. He stressed that it was not an ideological issue and that ministers were interested in what would work – not in fighting the ideological battles of the past.
Denis Chamberlain, Lasalle Investment Management, with six science parks around the UK, expressed interest in the catapult centre approach. LaSalle had money to invest, with £50m committed to Stoneleigh Park – home to the Royal Agricultural Society of England - over the next 10 years. How might the catapult system work within the agricultural life sciences sector?
DW noted that the success of catapult centres was driven by the level of demand from the business community for a research facility which could not be resourced from the market alone. He highlighted the role and expertise of TSB in making the concept work within a range of sectors, although it was not yet clear how or whether it was the right model for agricultural innovation.
GF also highlighted the success of the catalyst fund in the life sciences strategy, which invited bids for grants of £50k, £500k or £1m from researchers with a commercial partner, a protected or protectable innovation, a sponsoring clinician and proof of concept from that clinician. A flood of applications had been received over the past year since the fund was launched, and officials were considering whether a similar model might be appropriate or relevant for the agri-tech sector.