Presentation to CSREES Listening Session

New Orleans, October 25, 2001

Jon A. Brandt
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
North Carolina State University
New Orleans, October 25, 2001

Thank you for the opportunity to address this group this morning. I am Jon A. Brandt, Head of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC. I applaud CSREES for conducting these sessions to receive feedback about your programs and how they impact us.

As a social scientist and more specifically an agricultural economist, I appreciate the various programs that CSREES has sponsored that have resulted in opportunities for colleagues in my department to maintain or enhance research and extension activities. I have been a strong advocate to my faculty for them to participate through proposal writing as well as proposal reviewing in the various opportunities from CSREES. We have had some success in receiving funding from CSREES programs (specifically NRI and IFAFS) in the past and these funds have allowed our faculty to address important research and outreach issues facing our state, region, and nation. Without funds being available in these programs to scientists around the country, our success rate in solving some of the challenges facing the food and fiber sector would be much lower and/or take much longer to accomplish.

I raise up for you an issue to consider. I was among the group that helped to develop the early "markets and trade and rural development" component of the NRI program. Social scientists felt this was an important beginning. As a researcher at the time, my own somewhat narrow world suggested that opportunities for extramural funding were increased with the NRI program. I have been an NRI proposal reviewer for several years. This is an important program that moves research forward. Economists have been able to apply advanced theoretical and quantitative tools to relevant policy issues, generating policy prescriptions for consideration by decision-makers. Funds available in this area are small relative to the good research ideas and issues that need exploring. I encourage you to increase the funds available to this particular program and to close the funding gap between this important program and the other NRI programs. Doubling the funding for the total program is a worthy goal, but increasing the share of funds that are distributed to social scientists is also important. Virtually all users of agricultural research have an economic incentive in mind: lower cost of production, more efficient use of resources, greater profits, etc. Yet without an increase in the funds made available to economic research, these issues will remain unresolved, particularly as scientists in other disciplines move their own research discoveries forward without benefit of economic analyses.

More recently, as department head and member of the College administrative team and as one more mature in my thinking, I have come to realize that the value of economic research is not limited to the Markets and Trade portion of the NRI program. Virtually all of the important problems facing food, agriculture, and the agribusiness sector require multidisciplinary efforts. I know that you have heard this before but it bears repeating. Whatever you can do to encourage or enhance opportunities for economic research to be an integral part of the project design in the other program areas of the NRI will, in my opinion, reap large rewards in the discovery process. Economic and other social science research is not peripheral but primary in the real world challenges facing our sector today. Wording in the RFPs that promotes interdepartmental collaboration should be applauded. Social science panel members on the NRI programs would be a necessary part of this effort. I urge you to continue to move in that direction. I strongly support the effort to double NRI funding over the next five years.

A relatively new program of CSREES is IFAFS. This program shows much promise in creating opportunities for collaboration across the discovery and engagement functions. A year ago, I served as a panel member on one of the IFAFS programs (Biotechnology-Social Science). That gave me an opportunity to review and evaluate a large number of proposals that attempted to bring research and extension efforts together in the tasks of problem identification, solution, and dissemination of results to users. The fact that farmers and agribusiness persons were also members of the peer review panel brought a deeper sense of appreciation for the important problems facing these stakeholders. I congratulate you on this effort and encourage your continuation of this process. Once again, I want to support the idea of creating language in the RFP for each area that encourages not only multifunctional (research, extension, and teaching) but also multidisciplinary collaboration of investigators. Efforts to break down the walls between disciplines will be rewarded with more innovative, relevant, and "system" problem solving than we have observed up to now.

In my evaluation of the proposal for IFAFS Biotechnology and its Impacts, it became clear early on that there were more good ideas to be supported than there were funds available. While the process works to insure that only the very best proposals will receive support, it also tends to insure that proposal writers will more often than not be rejected by the process and discouraged in the grant writing effort. Two points stood out in the review process. Significant attention was paid to the research-education continuum. Proposals that lacked either component were discounted. This process insures that not only is discovery important but also that the information is shared with and disseminated to actual users of this information. Second, multidisciplinary, multi-university proposals were rewarded. Again, the review panel recognized that persons with abilities to conduct research and disseminate results do not reside in one department or on one campus. I hope that IFAFS will continue to select proposals that are system oriented and that recognize the need to bring economists together with engineers and plant breeders and nutritionists when the issue calls for this type of collaboration.

I encourage CSREES to seek increased funding in this important area. I expect that based on the comments of the farmer/agribusiness panel reviewers on the team, you would get much support from them in contacting key persons in Congress. I hope that you will work diligently to increase the funds available for this important program so that more excellent proposals can be funded in the future.

I believe that Directors of Agricultural Experiment Stations across the country are coming to realize more and more that many (if not all) of the food and fiber production, processing and environmental challenges facing colleges of agriculture have a very significant social science dimension to them. Simply finding new ways to produce more is not sufficient to members of our society who take safe, nutritious, and inexpensive food purchased in the grocery store or restaurant for granted. They have important beliefs and perceptions about how that food is produced, how resources are used in its production, and about the future sustainability of not only food production but also the environment. This suggests that economic risk assessment and society welfare issues will need to be an integral part of the research, teaching, and extension efforts sponsored by CSREES. If you agree with this assessment, I hope that you will do all in your power to reward proposals that include economic and other social science dimensions.

Finally, let me reiterate that the agricultural sector (and the public at large) relies on science to make gains in the efficient production, processing, and retailing of food and fiber in this country. That science is extended to users around the world. Without USDA funds, scientists at land grant universities and particularly those in colleges of agriculture would not be able to continue these discovery pursuits that have resulted in the safe, nutritious, secure, diverse, and environmentally friendly food supply that all of society enjoys today in this country. We cannot afford to back pedal at this time. Efforts to renew and expand these important programs - NRI, IFAFS, and others - are essential if we are to make further gains in the effective and efficient use of our nation's resources to produce food and fiber in an environmentally sound manner.

Thank you.