No Blade of Grass

There's a 1960s British science fiction novel by John Christopher (better known for the Tripods YA series) called No Blade of Grass, in which all of the grasses -- including wheat, corn and rice -- are wiped out by disease. I haven't read it for a few decades, but it sounds like it might be time to check it out again.

AP had a recent story about a fungus that's making a resurgence against wheat plants. A fungus-resistant strain of wheat, bred by agricultural scientists forty-some years ago, is not resistant to the latest incarnations of the fungus, which causes rust that kills the wheat plant.

Dr. Yue Jin, the lead researcher who is trying to breed new, more resistant wheat varieties -- get this -- has had his funding cut. Yes, it's terrible, I agree.

According to AP, though, the cuts were caused by a short-sighted Congress eager to fund its own earmarks.

As proof, the story gives us this bit of generality:

But despite the emergency, Associated Press interviews and a review of budget and research documents show that spending for Jin's laboratory and others where breeders develop disease-resistant wheat plants are being reduced this year, their money diverted to other programs and earmarked for special causes of members of Congress.

"Earmarking has been going up, and our discretionary funds have been going down," said Henrietta Fore, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has long provided much of the money for international agriculture research labs.

Is that a scientist speaking? One thing happens, then a second thing happens, and therefore the first caused the second? Can you say "causality"?

It's factual for AP to state that Jin had his budget cut 20 percent last year, and that other international research centers have had their funding from U.S. AID cut by nearly 75 percent (from $25 million to $7 million). But it seems incredibly naive to me for AP to attribute these cuts solely to earmarks.

It seems just as plausible to say the cuts were necessary to fund the war in Iraq. It's all one pot of money, after all, and the war takes a much bigger chunk of the funds than the earmarks do. The annual cost of earmarks is about $17 billion in the most recent year available; the annual cost of the war, $200 billion. Gee, which one might impinge more on agricultural research budgets?

Digging further into the story as carried in the Washington Post (the part not carried in the Star Tribune, where I first read it), it becomes clear the international funding shortfall has little to do with earmarks, but rather a rearrangement of U.S. AID's priorities to fund specific projects in countries the U.S. wants to be friends with, rather than fund general agricultural projects such as the wheat research. The Post version even mentions that U.S. research institutions got more money from U.S. AID because they lobbied Congress, while the international researchers did not.

So, while this is an obviously important story, the sloppy attribution of the funding shortfall to the earmark whipping boy undermines it. Gosh, I though I was watching Fox News for a minute.

Finally, an interesting note for me: Dr. Jin and his team do their research in a series of greenhouses on the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota, not too far from my house. Good luck and future funding to them.