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What’s researched in China stays in China

It was just a couple of weeks ago at a meeting held by the American Association for the
Advancement of Science that Felton noticed something he’d never seen before at one of these
gatherings.
Scientists were carrying their papers and other documents in bags with a European Union logo
on them. Not only that, but EU representatives were handing out pamphlets, inviting U.S.
scientists to take their work across the Atlantic Ocean.

Felton said he doesn’t normally take the freebie bags at these kind of events, but he took this one
and saved it. One side of the bag reads: “Open to the World, Destination Europe.”

But it’s not just the EU that’s ramping up investment in agricultural research so much that they
are willing to pay for U.S. science. It’s also China, India, Brazil and Australia.
John McDowell, a Virginia Tech scientist who is researching new ways to protect soybeans from
destructive pathogens, explained his frustration this way: “When I look at my counterparts in
China, what I see is they have resources … that are greater than mine on the order of two-to-
fivefold, and I’m relatively well-funded. Their resources are on a whole other level.”

The investments
those countries and
others are making
have already begun
to show results, said
Russell.

“If you look at our
productivity
increases going back
to the early 70s,
we’ve averaged
about 1.5 percent
productivity increase
year after year,” he
said. “Meanwhile
(during) the last
probably two
decades China and
Brazil are increasing
their productivity on
an annual basis somewhere in the neighborhood of over 2 percent. They’re investing billions in
ag research and we need to take a hard look at that from our own competitiveness perspective as
we move forward.”

If the results of all of that research that China is funding were made available to the world, that
might be acceptable. But with China, that’s often not the case, scientists say.

122 www.Agri-Pulse.com