Task force recommends independent ag research institute. within United States, Department of Agriculture

Food & Drink Weekly, Sept 13, 2004

The federal government should establish a National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) within USDA--but independent of the department--"for the purpose of ensuring the technological superiority of American agriculture," according to the draft recommendations of a special agricultural research task force.

As envisioned, NIFA would report directly to the secretary of agriculture, but it would "be kept separate and managed differently from existing programs so as to develop its own culture and establish its own methods of operation."

The task force says it believes there is an impending crisis in the food, agricultural and natural resource systems of the United States, which are currently threatened on several fronts.

For example, U.S. soybean growers no longer are the world's lowest cost producers; exotic diseases and pests threaten crops and livestock; obesity has reached epidemic proportions; agriculture related environmental degradation is a serious problem for the United States and other parts of the world; and certain animal diseases threaten human health. NIFA would address many of these issues through increased research funding.

The overall mission of NIFA would be to support fundamental agricultural research designed to: increase the competitiveness of U.S. agriculture; develop foods that improve health and combat obesity; create new and more useful products from plants and animals; improve food safety and food security; enhance agricultural sustainability and improve the environment; strengthen the economies of the nation's rural communities; decrease U.S. dependence on foreign sources of petroleum by developing bio-based fuels; and strengthen national security "by improving the agricultural productivity of subsistence farmers in developing countries to combat hunger and the political instability it produces."

The task force recommends that NIFA's mission supplement and enhance, not replace, USDA's existing research programs and that the new institute should function as a grant-making agency "funding proposals submitted by both individual scientists and single and multi-institutional research centers." The panel recommends that the institute's director be appointed by the president and confirmed by the United States Senate. NIFA's annual budget should build to $1 billion over a five-year period. In addition, says the task force, "NIFA should be independent of all existing management structures of the USDA."

The panel says it chose the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation as models for NIFA. "Both institutions efficiently manage highly competitive, merit-based, peer-reviewed grant programs that attract and support the nation's leading scientists," says the task force. And, both encourage open competition for grants, and both provide grants of sufficient size "so that outstanding scientists from a variety of disciplines are able to carry out first-class research appropriate to the missions of the agencies."

Formation of the research, education and economics task force was directed by the 2002 farm bill. Its main duties were to review USDA's Agricultural Research Service and to evaluate the merits of establishing "one or more national institutes focused on disciplines important to the progress of food and agricultural science." Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman appointed task force members in 2003. The group's report to the House and Senate Agriculture Committees and to Veneman was supposed to have been completed no later than May 2003.