The American Society of Agronomy (ASA) recently shared a report warning that U.S. public plant breeding programs, and, as a result, the food supply, are in crisis due to declining public efforts in plant-breeding.
 
The majority of today’s plant-based foods are products of plant breeding, and these programs often focus on crops that are important to society and the environment, but are often less profitable, and therefore are under-produced for their inability to drive the bottom line for large businesses. ASA warns that these programs are operating at a reduced capacity according to a number of studies published over recent years.
 
They cited a survey conducted by the U.S. Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee, which included 278 public sector plant breeding programs, which enrolled 278 public sector plant breeding programs, spanning 44 U.S. states. The results were published in an article appearing in the journal Crop Science.
 
“Programs reported significantly declining personnel hours, with many reporting that budget shortfalls or uncertainty ‘endangered or severely constrained’ their ability to support key personnel, infrastructure, and operations, and access to technology,” the organization said. “Graduate student and postdoc positions were typically the most at risk, impacting the pipeline of future breeders into both public and private sectors. Almost half of program leaders were nearing retirement age.”
 
The survey reported that 33.7% of the programs were represented by breeders age 60 or older, almost half (49.4%) were represented by breeders age 55 or older, and 62% of programs were represented by breeders age 50 or older, signifying that there are not enough young breeders working in public programs today to maintain the level of development.
 
The access to funding, technology, knowledge, and expertise is declining at these programs, the organization warned, which is a sign that U.S. plant breeding capacity as a whole in both the public and private sectors is at risk, jeopardizing food security, natural resource resilience, and public health.
 
According to the survey, institutional funds, federal competitive grants, and commodity check-off programs account for 67% of program budgets, signifying that public plant breeding programs have a heavy stake in the continuation of public support.
 
In 2015, the USDA published its Roadmap for Plant Breeding, in which the agency acknowledged many examples in which publicly-funded plant breeding operations resulted in scientific and economic outcomes that “were highly unlikely to have been achieved by private organizations alone,” and that, even in those cases, public breeding operations were afforded short-term funding sources long enough to sustain 1-5 years of development, though the projects themselves were “typically a 7- to 12-year process, or far longer.”