Thanks to Bush's new cuts on public funding for land-grant schools, agribusiness is gaining a huge foothold in the future of our food. Like more than a hundred public institutions of higher learning, Cornell is what's known as a "land grant." Dotting the United States from Ithaca, N.Y., to Pullman, Wash., such schools were established by a Civil War-era act of Congress to provide universities centered around, "the agriculture and mechanic arts." Congress handed each U.S. state a chunk of federal land to be sold for start-up monies, and for the last 150 years, it has funded ground-breaking research on all things agriculture, from dirt to crops to cattle.
The land-grant system has been, in short, a high-yield investment. The scientific research that has come out of land-grant labs and fields have aided millions of farmers and fed millions of Americans. And the land-grant reach doesn't stop at ocean's edge. Oklahoma State, the Sooner State's land grant, says that the public funding of land-grant research "has benefited every man, woman and child in the United States and much of the world."
That was until America's land-grant system met George W. Bush.
Tucked into the appendix of his latest national budget is a nearly one-third cut in the public funding for agriculture research at the land grants. The size of the cut is surprising, but not its existence --
it's part of a multiyear drive by the Bush administration to completely eliminate regular public research funding. In a press briefing last week, a USDA deputy secretary
illuminated the Bush administration's rationale for the transition to competitive grant making: "That's how you get the most bang for the buck."
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What is the future of ag research?"Good question. A reasonable answer?
The future of agricultural research at America's land-grant institutions belongs to biotech conglomerates like Monsanto. And it seems likely that it's a future of chemical-dependent, genetically modified, bio-engineered agriculture.
AlterNet