By Bill Tomson, March 12, 2015
(Published by Politico)
It’s a bad year to ask Congress for a 38 percent raise, but that’s exactly what the Obama administration is doing on behalf of a new program that better fosters competition among the nation’s agricultural research universities…Read more.
The budget omnibus agreement reached by Congress for FY 2018 today includes a $25 million increase for the US Department of Agriculture’s flagship competitive research program and a $140 million increase for the agency’s research, education, and economics portfolio. The budget for the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) has now reached $400 million, with the last three fiscal budgets providing a total 23 percent boost.
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a groundbreaking report in April 2015 on the “innovation deficit.” According to the report, the federal government is abandoning the pursuit of progress by cutting back its funding of scientific research, and leaving it for other countries to accomplish the breakthroughs.
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A few years ago, scientists monitoring insect populations began to sound the alarm that honey bees, a critical player in how plants reproduce, were disappearing in ever larger numbers. In the past year, beekeepers lost 40 percent of their colonies, and entomologists were also seeing alarming losses in wild colonies around the country.
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