This piece originally appeared on Agri-Pulse.
By Tom Grumbly, president, Supporters of Agricultural Research Foundation
Editor's Note: Agri-Pulse and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs are teaming up to host a monthly column to explore how the U.S. agriculture and food sector can maintain its competitive edge and advance food security in an increasingly integrated and dynamic world.
In California, five years of record-breaking drought have given way to a record-breaking winter of rain and snow that has provided farmers more water than they know what to do with. Southern Africa has had a similar experience, with record drought followed by torrential rains and floods. This change has also been accompanied by the rapid expansion of a new invasive pest—the fall armyworm.
The armyworms came to Southern Africa, where they devoured more than 700,000 acres of crops, from the Americas. Every year Brazil spends an estimated US$600 million to contain the pest. Efforts in the US to develop plants that repel the armyworm have thus far yielded only mixed results.
And so it goes with agriculture around the world. Problems develop in one region and then crop up somewhere else; solutions develop in the original place but take too long to travel to where they are needed. In the US, annual losses just from invasive plant pests and diseases amount to approximately $40 billion, and the answers to these problems are rarely simple and easy to implement.
As agriculture and its problems continue to evolve, the science that helps farmers solve their problems has to evolve as well. Governments around the world need to dedicate funding to research that not only addresses today’s farming troubles but heads off tomorrow’s troubles as well.