Thursday 19th April

Workshops 1 and 2:  Working towards sustainable partnerships

Dr Claire Cockcroft

Agriculture will come under renewed pressure during the next decades if it is to supply enough food of a good nutritional content to feed a population predicted to reach 8 or 9 billion by 2020. Water is becoming increasingly scarce and the area of fertile arable land is shrinking year by year, threatening the security of food production. The future of agriculture was discussed at the “Global Agriculture 2020: which way forward?” conference, held at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, a leading voice in plant science research. The role of public and private funding in research and the need to make innovations widely available to both big business and small-scale farmers were some of the topical issues addressed at this meeting.

There is a progressively more blurred distinction between public and private sector research, as funding is increasingly derived, albeit indirectly from the private sector. This being the case, it is important to ascertain whose priorities and interests are shaping the overall priorities and trajectories of science.

Is industry driven only by profit, or will an ethical concern also be a consideration to the private sector in a world where burgeoning population and diminishing natural resources limit the efficiency of existing agricultural practices? A future where there is increased co-operation between public and private research institutions, as well as communities, may enable both the small-scale-farmer and big business to reap the benefits of agricultural bioscience research.

It is instructive to consider the respective motives and resources of publicly and privately-funded research efforts. Universities play an important role in the development of science and technology but there is a question mark over the extent to which major innovations can occur in purely academic environment, given the vast difference in resources available to publicly and privately-funded ventures. However, as long as private capital continues to be allocated on the basis of an expectation of future dividends, it will never constitute a substitution for publicly–funded research.

The public sector provides a strong academic voice discovering basic fundamental research and providing a working principal, but commercialisation of research is invariably performed in the private sector. While the academic environment provides the freedom to pursue fundamental “blue-sky” research, private funding is typically clustered around innovations of a high known or suspected value. On a purely privately-funded model, this would mean no funding for activities that were not “perceived” to have high commercial value for example research focused on non-cash crops and initiatives directed at delivering broad-based benefit to agribusiness in less developed countries (LDCs).

The John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich, a not-for-profit organisation funded largely by the BBSRC, is carrying out fundamental research in the public domain to support agriculture and biotechnology in the UK. Additional funding from charitable organisations facilitates the flow of information to a broader sphere of activity, a commitment to enhancing agriculture in developing countries by applying contemporary science to traditional agricultural practices. The JIC in turn believes in supporting start-ups to commercialise and spread the benefit of innovation.

Prof Chris Lamb, director of the JIC, believes that, “if we do not make knowledge available very openly and effectively at a global level, we will regret it”. But to do this, creative new partnerships are needed encompassing all sectors from industry and academics, governments and the European Union, developing countries and charities to create new bridges for enhancing technology transfer to small and large scale farmers. This will ensure that the benefits of research, which is expensive to perform, are made as widely available as possible, across the various divides.

To patent or not to patent?

The thorny issue of patenting is central to the discussion of public-private partnerships. Patenting is a strategy that enables scientists to protect their technological developments it also reinforces the negotiating power of universities with the private sector. Intellectual property rights (IPR) allow academics to protect a “raw” potentially great idea and increase the likelihood that the knowledge might be brought into practice through partnerships with the private sector rather than misused or simply sat on. Patenting also provides an element of control for the inventors when granting the licence for the technology to an external party, dictating specific areas to which the technology can be applied, according to their expertise, and retaining the ability to revoke the right at any time.

Since academic research is often based around model systems such as Arabidopsis, tobacco or even cell suspension cultures, the idea is unlikely to have been tested in commercially useful crops and is consequently far from a final product. However, it demonstrates a “proof of principle” that may have considerable potential applications. The time taken to develop the initial idea and basic research mission into a useful product of commercial interest is lengthy and the IPR system serves to protect the private sector’s investment. Needless to say there is the prospect of financial returns from patenting which are channelled back into public domain research, perpetuating a kind of virtuous cycle of innovation.

Ultimately, among the multitude of reasons that justify the patenting of research within academic institutions, one of the most important is the humanitarian motive, to ensure that know-how and technology is available to give away to those who need it.

The public-private partnership

Over the next twenty years, new paradigms will appear, perhaps where work is shaped in the public sector and executed in the private sector and a partnership between the two is formally established. There has recently been a constructive move and willingness of universities to engage private sector institutions. Productive partnerships between the two sectors are already forming, including the new venture between the JIC and Syngenta, enabling industry to interact with the science base. DuPont also has a long history of making technology widely available and is involved in a similar cooperation with the University of Missouri.

Academic establishments recognise that companies can contribute money, facilities and brainpower to their research within a “for-profit” framework, seeking a source of new ideas, products and technologies in return. Multinational corporations are keen to become more participatory, forming major strategic partnerships with the public sector for the creation of new technology. But there is no one winning formula for striking the right balance between public and private research in these partnerships. There are likely to be a multiplicity of ways of interacting that will depend on the different corporations and academic institutions involved and will also need to be tailored to the particular part of the world in which the effort is focused.

While industry is keen to support academic research that is of mutual benefit, an interesting problem presents itself when the research is likely to benefit only farmers in the developing world. This impinges on the contentious IPR debate and raises ethical concerns about patenting. If a technology is patented by the private sector in a developed country, but could be usefully applied to a minor market crop or in a developing country that cannot afford to pay for the rights, would corporations be willing to still support research into it when the returns are not financially attractive?

Rice is a staple crop for 40% of the world. Given this central role of rice in global food supply and the recent completion of the rice genome, combining the complementary resources and expertise from the public domain, notably International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and private sector would create a research platform that would accelerate gene discovery and crop improvement. The involvement of companies like Syngenta, facilitating global availability of technologies such as golden rice, emphasises the social good these partnerships can generate.

However, the desire of a company to form interactions with public institutions may be influenced by the crop of interest and the potential returns the research will yield. It is inevitable that large corporations are only going to focus their research on a very limited range of agriculturally-important crops, key commodities like cereals and not crops such as yam, cassava, bananas and other domestic foods in both developed and less developed countries. Smaller volume, minor market crops, which are valuable for small-scale farmers and for preserving agricultural diversity are overlooked. If funding of public research is derived solely from industry, this might preclude any fundamental research being carried out on these crops, preventing propagation of knowledge for crops that have a potentially important role to play in agriculture in many parts of the world.

Furthermore, if public sector research wants to use a gene or a technology that has been licensed in the private sector for a minor market crop such as legumes, then the thorny issue of public liability, rears its head — the right to use the technology is denied because potential product liability exposure cannot be offset against large potential revenues.

Preserving agricultural diversity

Food security depends on a small number of species –– currently about 6 crops provide over 90% of global food needs with three crops, rice, maize and wheat providing the bulk. This lack of diversity within food production systems can create vulnerability, and to guarantee global food security agriculture needs to widen the food basket from the major staples, corn, rice, wheat and potatoes to include beans, pulses and legumes. The emphasis on increased agricultural trade has also seen farmers from LDCs focusing on products that have international markets, albeit for a relatively tiny and affluent subsection of the population, such as coffee, tea, cocoa and tobacco as well as animal feed. Publicly-funded efforts offer the possibility to support agricultural diversity, drawing in technology that both preserves important crops and species while providing attractive returns and therefore incentives for farmers.

The next 20 to 30 years or so will witness considerable development in the field of agriculture. The larger scale farmer will be producing large quantities of large volume crops like cereals but the day of the small farmer has not gone. They will play an ever more important role, producing not just small volume crops, but also a diverse range of non-food crops like designer oils or pharmaceuticals, and will be instrumental in the changing face of British agriculture as plants become recognised as the factories of the future.

Prof Dick Flavell of Ceres Inc., has called for more public funds to be invested in plant breeding at a global level. However, because local breeding is involved in adapting local germplasm to local conditions, and the multinationals are not in most of these places, it falls to regionally based or local organisations to deliver solutions through, for example, World Bank loans, the local taxpayer and government initiatives. If we want to bring the fruits of frontier science to the needs and problems that manifest themselves in the far corners of the world, there is a real need for participation from all sectors, the scientific communities, governments and charities. Public investment in plant breeding and local entrepreneurship is valuable for improving efficiency in the agricultural sector. Prof Flavell believes in, “stimulating local enterprise, right down to the local farmer so that local wealth can be improved right there at the level of the family.”

Investment in communication

Obtaining consumer confidence and acceptance is another hurdle ahead for both private and public sector research. The majority of the public are ill-informed about science and are inherently suspicious of scientists who are no longer assumed to be impartial due to financial support from industry. The public in general remain sceptical of the intentions of the large multinationals and are often more concerned that these organisations will gain too much power through the technology than they are about transgenic plants per se. Global investment in education is critical and may help to overcome public mistrust and gain acceptance of the technology or at least facilitate informed debate.

Which way forward?

The landscape of science and technology is constantly changing and it is becoming increasingly difficult to divide research into purely public and private entities. Rather than ivory towers, today’s public institutions are centres of innovation, not simply focused on pure research. They are competing with the private sector to receive the intellectual property high ground in areas of common interest. Academia is increasingly becoming more entrepreneurial. Academics are now increasingly motivated by commercial spin-offs and spin-outs of publicly-funded research –– there is glory at stake alongside potentially significant financial rewards. This will continue to blur the once stark contrast between public and private research efforts and will place renewed emphasis on the role of multinational institutions and NGOs such as the Rockefeller Foundation that have the means to redress the balance in favour of applications that aren’t commercially favourable.

Science has a social dimension that it can fulfil when it makes technology accessible to the people who most need it. The implementation of a “public good theory” such as that developed by Jeffrey Sachs in relation to the global healthcare sector should be given some consideration in this field of interest. Obtaining funding to support fundamental research and development of technologies in developing countries is challenging in today’s political climate, and is exacerbated by public distrust and disinterest in technologies of no direct commercial benefit.

There may be grounds for the creation of a new organisation that brings together corporations with a vested interest in the plant biotechnology sphere, alongside important NGOs and international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF under the common goal of transferring the technology and its benefits to LDCs. This would redress the inevitable imbalances created by market economics, providing a mechanism for the allocation of investment in plant biotech research and redistribution of profits towards worthy ends.

In the pursuit of laudable goals such as food security, there is a moral obligation to form flexible new partnerships within the context of this rapidly evolving landscape on a global scale. Different combinations of players, from academia, industry, governments, charities and personal investors can make an enormous difference. But in spite of the existence of a moral obligation, there has to be a commitment to drive the partnerships. Unless this commitment is forthcoming, all the wonderful science and its potential promise in agriculture will be catastrophically delayed, threatening the food security of the countries least able to help themselves at today’s critical juncture.