Testimony of Robert B. Horsch
Monsanto Company

Before the United States Senate
Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry

March 18, 1997

Overview

Good morning Chairman Lugar and members of the Committee. I am pleased to be here on behalf of Monsanto Company to discuss the National Research Initiative and reauthorization of the agriculture research programs in the 1996 farm bill. It is a privilege to have this opportunity to share our experiences and recommendations with you.

The importance of the United States' national agricultural research programs cannot be overstated. The United States supports the most productive agricultural system in the world and shares the fruits of this system by producing food and fiber in abundance, by training students here and from other countries, by sharing research results with scientists around the world and by exporting technology and agricultural products. The return on the public investment in agricultural research to support this system is immense and there is every reason to believe that the rewards from agricultural research will continue to grow. Financial support from the federal government is vitally needed now and in the future.

Continued improvement in agricultural productivity is essential as available land for agricultural use decreases and world population continues to grow. The higher the yields on existing farmland, the less the pressure to encroach on wilderness or forest lands. Protection of wildlife habitat is essential for biodiversity preservation and for ecosystem protections such as watershed buffers, recycling of atmospheric gases and solid nutrients and mitigation of environmental stresses caused by human activity. The contribution to global as well as local environmental and economic protection by high yield farming is significant.

Genetic improvements in crops and improvements in management practices will enable increased yields while simultaneously decreasing resource consumption, waste and pollutants related to agriculture. These improvements ill be brought about by new discoveries in biotechnology as well as through classical breeding techniques, molecular marker inventions and knowledge of plant physiology, agronomy, soil science, basic biology and related disciplines. New discoveries will mean continued decline in the real cost of food production. Increases in productivity will also provide strong stimuli to economic growth. New crop varieties with higher value characteristics, including biomaterials and bioenergy uses, will open new markets for our agricultural harvests, further fostering economic growth. Improvements in the quality and nutritional vale of whole foods or food ingredients will contribute to a healthier diet and food that is more efficient to process, transport and store.

In addition to research funding support in order to help make all of this possible, it is critical that this committee and all government officials be vigilant about the importance of free and open world markets for these new discoveries and products.

Key Issues

Agricultural research should be intimately tied to higher education and to extension services. The best model will support research at most universities, including both land grant and private institutions distributed across all areas of the country.

Public research has been evolving in focus and agenda, serving a complementary role to private sector product development investments and successes. The role of public research continues to be essential to the successful growth and development of American agriculture. The private sector will not substitute for or replace public sector research or research funding. It would be a tragic mistake to assume private industry will fund long term fundamental or strategic research, education or extension services on a broad scale, long range basis. Industry will build on new, publicly funded research discoveries and will add value and utility to these discoveries. It will hire and continue to train graduates of universities in a way that benefits progress. However, industry will always be focused primarily on commercial goals. Public funding of the basic infrastructure keeps the system honest and open and provides resources for fundamental research unlikely to be undertaken by industry on a sustained basis.

Cooperative Research and Development agreements (CRADAs) with industry are an excellent mechanism for transferring research innovations to adoption and should be an integral component of the ARS research process. In order to attract the highest quality industry participation, ARS should undertake an aggressive approach to protect intellectual property rights of the parties to the agreements.

The unbiased and cost effective evaluation of new and existing agricultural products and production methods by extension agents is a great service to farmers and industry alike, and should also be supported by continuing public funding. Recently, the extension service has displayed a lack of focus on fundamental services needed by the agriculture sector. This lack of focus has been the result, we believe, of the scarcity of funds and the resulting necessity for extension service personnel to "chase" funding by concentrating on popular, currently fashionable initiatives. Focus can be gained by increasing funding through "check-offs" organized and administered through commodity groups and production associations. The advantages to this process would be (1) accountability ack to the funding source; (2) funding levels which match priorities of the funding source; (3) quick response to new needs and avoidance delays cause by overly bureaucratic approval processes and (4) ability to recruit exceptionally qualified personnel as a result of higher and more stable funding.

The competitive grants program is the best value anywhere. No other method of allocating funds to the best project ideas and most productive scientists has ever been devised. Competitive programs should be steadily expanded. Grant sizes should be larger and the USDA's seventeen percent overhead cap should be dropped. The overhead cap is a false economy -- someone else just pays the remainder of the real costs. The overhead cap operates to exclude institutions that don't have resources to subsidize USDA, which results in a large scale exclusion of plant biology from the courses and research agendas of many non-land grant university programs.

I have personally participated in the review process for competitive grants for NSF, USDA and DOE. In all cases, the process has been exemplary in its integrity and ability to choose the best topics, the best work plans and the most productive research to be supported with these funds. The number of top quality proposals has been much higher than the available funds can support. Increasing the total funds substantially would not result in diminishing returns on the investment. To the contrary, larger size, longer term grants would increase the productivity of the review process an of the work itself.

The freedom of federally supported researchers to collaborate with industry and to license exclusively on non-exclusively allows for maximizing private side investment along related or sequential lines. This capability has been a major advance at USDA in recent years and should be continued. Matching funds to industry is an efficient method of enhance the productivity of competitive grants to universities.

Finally, I strongly recommend supporting excellent science to push back the frontiers of knowledge as the chief criteria for awarding funds. We cannot predict what discoveries will be of greatest value twenty years from now. We must pursue an understanding of nature with excellent science as the primary criteria for awards. This is not meant to exclude all other research, but we are not very good at directing applied research through a central planning method.

Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, thank you again for inviting me to speak with you today. We are grateful to have the opportunity to express our views on this important subject.