Spurring Innovation in Food and Agriculture A Review of the USDA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Program (2014) / Chapter Skim
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Waning public investments in U.S. agricultural R&D will probably slow innovation and slow the growth of the knowledge base necessary to meet the ever-evolving challenges presented by increasingly competitive global markets, increasingly scarce natural resources, growing environmental issues, and expanding demands for healthy, safe, and accessible food for consumers in the United States and other countries.
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A peer- reviewed, competitive grants program was proposed as a means of broadening the publicly funded agricultural research portfolio while also enhancing the foundational research that is indispensable for ensuring progress in the agricultural sciences and the economic sectors it serves. Since 1977, there have been several versions of competitive grant programs within USDA: Competitive Research Grants Office, National Research Initiative, Fund for Rural America, and the Initiative for Future Agricultural and Food Systems.
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• Consider whether NIFA funding mechanisms, including the process of setting annual funding priorities, the shift to five NIFA challenge areas, and the balance between challenge area grants and foundational program grants, are ap propriate for meeting AFRI's desired goals and outcomes. • Compare NIFA's decision to fund fewer, higher-dollar and longer-term grants through AFRI to the former National Research Initiative (NRI)
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In reviewing the AFRI program, the committee focused its evaluation on AFRI and did not provide a detailed review of USDA's entire research, extension, and education portfolio nor did the committee conduct a detailed comparison of AFRI to other USDA programs (intramural and extramural) and funding mechanisms (formula and competitive grants)
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Later communications with NIFA provided a more explicit basis for understanding AFRI's program structure with its two program areas (challenge and foundational) , five challenge priority areas, six foundation priority areas, and five grant types -- for which the committee concluded that the structure was unnecessarily complex.
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Simpli fication of program structure to focus on the six foundation prior ity areas would improve efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency. Rebalancing the Portfolio AFRI's ambitious portfolio of multiple grant types is undercutting its mission to support fundamental research, which generates critical knowledge and tools for future applications.
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topics specified for foundational grants are increasingly narrow in scope and weighted toward applied research. Given its limited budget, if AFRI continues with that approach, the scientific workforce available to conduct fundamental research in the agricultural and food sciences may continue to severely diminish.
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Recommendation 2-C: AFRI should carefully examine the causes of the decline in the numbers of applicants, awardees, and trainees and adjust its grant programs to ensure that future generations of young scientists are not lost inadvertently from food and agriculture R&D because of funding policies. Coordinated Agricultural Project Grants Adjusting for the time since project initiation, there is evidence that the large project scope and complexity of these grants have resulted in fewer scholarly products (publications, papers, and presentations)
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Recommendation 2-D: AFRI should consider eliminating CAP grants as a grant category and committing more resources to other grant types. Strategy and Collaboration AFRI's research, extension, and education portfolio is appropriately targeted to meeting the nation's food and agricultural needs.
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External Advisory Council Unlike NIH and NSF, AFRI does not have a formal, external, and strictly scientific advisory council. Such a council would be highly valuable for the following functions of the AFRI program: to guide, advise on, review, and assess on an ongoing basis priority setting, resource allocation, program policies, and peer-review and award-management processes.
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Recommendation 3-B: NIFA should form an AFRI Scientific Advisory Council that consists of members who represent the food and agricul tural research, education, and extension professional communities. Program Management The AFRI program structure is unnecessarily complicated and is characterized by an elusive chain of command, and this complexity and lack of transparency has led to inefficient program management and operation.
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Recommendation 4-B: NIFA should have a more consistent and pre dictable program portfolio and funding strategy to enable better plan ning by the food and agricultural research community. Data Management Data are needed to inform management decisions and improve assessments of program efficiency and effectiveness.
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AFRI needs an information-management system that can provide the accurate information that is necessary for structured analyses of program activities and for analyzing and assessing project and programmatic outputs and outcomes. Conducting performance analyses will require systematic attention to medium-term and long-term outputs and, more importantly, projection of outcomes in the form of the science influenced, social and individual well-being, and products and incomes generated.
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Funding allocations to program areas are set before the award decision-making process, and this can limit the ability of NPLs to capitalize on innovative ideas presented in proposals and to pursue the most promising scientific opportunities. NPLs are PhD-level scientists in good standing in their own disciplinary communities who were recruited to manage AFRI grants on the basis of their scientific credentials, and they should be trusted to exercise their professional judgment.
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The increase in FY 2014 appropriations for this flagship competitive research program is consistent with this report's findings, conclusions, and recommendations and suggests that USDA has a window of opportunity to establish NIFA as a strong science agency with AFRI at its core and to reinforce the value and mission of AFRI to the nation's well-being. The committee offers its recommendations in the hope that the suggested programmatic changes will enable NIFA to fulfill its mission of leading the food and agricultural sectors to a better future through research, education, and extension.
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