The Union Farmer Quarterly/Summer 2001

Power and Profit vs the Public Good

When you add in to the equation funding sources with vested financial interests in the scope and outcome of the research, whatever vestige of objectivity might remain disappears. Nor is it only objectivity that is sacrificed. As less and less public money is available for research, many projects which do not appeal to private funders simply don't happen, and the ones that do are subject to the terms and conditions set by those funders.

To get at the reality behind any research activity, then, there are key questions that must be asked. Who wants this research, and why? Who is doing it, and how, and why? Who are they doing it for, and how will the results be distributed or shared? In other words, who wins and who loses? Who benefits, and who pays?

As in so many other situations, the short answer to that question is this: the big agribusiness corporations benefit, while farmers and the general public pay. The long version of the answer is at least as disturbing.

There has probably always been some corporate influence on the direction of agricultural and food research; after all, agribusiness is hardly a new phenomenon. But over the past twenty years or so, with ever-increasing corporate concentration, powerful new technologies, and the withdrawal of government funding and regulation, the power of the global cor-porate giants has grown to overwhelming proportions. Corporations now set the research priorities, provide key funding, take ownership of the products and control the distribution of results, all with a view to maximizing their profits and improving their position on the stock exchange.

"Almost all agronomic research these days is tied to industry money," says NFU Board member Stewart Wells, who farms near Swift Current, Saskatchewan. "Practically no research gets done unless it is of direct benefit to some company." As farmers know only too well, what benefits the big companies is not usually what benefits the people who work the land, especially those who try to work it sustainable. As a result, more and more agricultural research is either irrelevant to farmers or actually goes against them.

As the chart on page 16 shows, the major players in the research game are corporations, governments and universities. So where in all this are the people we elect to represent our interests and defend the public good? Both federal and provincial governments seem to have

either identified completely with the corporate agenda or caved in to it under pressure. As for the universities, those bastions of intellectual freedom have seen their public funding cut by those same governments, leaving them at the mercy of the corporations with their stick-and-carrot techniques.

Those techniques include direct grants to universities for specific research projects, corporate sponsorship of professorial "chairs" devoted to a particular purpose, and the setting up and funding of university institutes or programs, arrangements often touted as "partnerships". Many university researchers are now dependent on getting repeated short-term funding just to be able to carry on their work. Some of that funding may come from sources like the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), but much of it comes from the corporations, complete with strings attached.

With governments, the corporate sector has worked hard to entrench the "partnership" model, and has succeeded to an alarming degree. One such arrangement is the "Matching Investment Initiative" (MII) in Agriculture Canada's Research Branch. This program, to which taxpayers contributed $32 million in 2000-2001, now "supports" more than three-quarters of the Department's research - a cool 930 research projects out of the total of 1270. According to Ag Canada, the MII "allows the department to match... private sector investment in collaborative research in our labs. It also allows us to set our research priorities in tune with market signals."

Indeed.

"The need for funding dictates what gets done in the way of research," says NFU Vice-president Fred Tait. He compares the process to what has been happening in the health care field: public funding gets cut back, the pressure mounts for service, and the private sector kindly steps in.

Tait cites the "farmer funded, farmer directed" Western Grains Research Foundation as an example of how this dynamic works. As the government withdrew public funds, it shifted the responsibility to the producers. But grain farmers, stuck in the worst farm income crisis since the 1930s, cannot provide the amounts of money that are needed. In this situation, they are forced into "partnerships" with the corporate sector.

Yet the government can point and say, "Farmers were given the opportunity to control it all themselves. But they chose voluntarily to involve the companies."

Much the same has happened within Agriculture Canada itself. Retired agronomist John Leyshon worked in the Regina, Swift Current and Winnipeg research stations from the mid-1970s on. He explains that initially he and his fellow scientists were all federal civil servants, and were not allowed to accept any money from business. "It was a way of keeping us completely independent," he says. But that began to change in the '80s when budget pressures sent some researchers out looking for grants. By the early 1990s, the department was actively encouraging them to do so.

This privatization of public research undermines the independence that government research scientists - and we the public - should be able to count on. Like their university counterparts, many Agriculture Canada scientists today are paid through short-term private funding mechanisms. As a result, not only do they have to spend chunks of their time trying to secure that next grant, they are also subject to pressure to come up with research results that will be acceptable to their corporate funders.

On that question, Leyshon is extremely discreet. "The quality of the research has not changed," he says. "The scientists at Agriculture Canada are some of the finest. They still do research as if they were independent. At least they try to." He admits there are stories of results being put in "as good a light as possible", in case the researcher wants to go back for more funds. And people have sometimes been pressured to keep quiet.

According to Leyshon, though, the big difference from before is that research results used to be totally open; now they are often proprietary. "Confidentiality agreements are standard business practice," he says. When business pays half the cost of a project, they don't want the results released for free. So they are not.

In fact, in many cases they are not released at all. This is especially disturbing when food safety or environmental risks are involved. With BGH, Monsanto and Health Canada used "proprietary" exemptions as an excuse to withhold key data on potential human health effects. When Access to Information requests were (finally) granted, the relevant data were blacked out. Government does this on a regular basis, making a mockery of the public's right to know.