Editorial

Three events in recent weeks in different parts of the world juxtaposed a problem and a potential solution.

In Rome, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization said the declining aid and investment in agriculture has driven up the number of hungry people around the globe to more than 1 billion. Since the 1980s, the agency said, the share of government aid and private investment allocated to agriculture has declined, and money has shifted to other areas.

The agency says global food production will have to increase by 70 percent over the next 40 years to meet the demand of the world's growing population. Farmers the world over, and especially in developing countries, need access to modern machinery, technology and techniques, and enhanced infrastructures that will enable them to grow crops and get them to market.

"In the fight against hunger the focus should be on increasing food production," FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf told The Associated Press. "It's common sense ... that agriculture would be given the priority, but the opposite has happened."

In Washington, D.C., Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the launch of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a new agency modeled after the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The NIFA, which replaces the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, will be responsible for providing, initially, $1.3 billion in competitive research grants in five areas -- global food security and hunger, climate change, sustainable energy, childhood obesity and food safety.

"I am asking today for a commitment of will and energy to bring about our generation's new era of agricultural science," Vilsack said.

And in Des Moines, Gebisa Ejeta, a Purdue University agronomist, was awarded the World Food Prize for the development of a high yielding, drought- and weed-resistant variety of sorghum that has increased food production on the African savannah.

An increasingly hungry world needs more scientists like Ejeta. In turn, those scientists need money from both public and private sources to fund the research that leads to the advances that increase the productivity and sustainability of the world's farmland.

We see great promise in Vilsack's vision for the NIFA. To be effective, it must fund the research that holds the most promise to feed a growing population, not that which serves some other ancillary purpose.

The goal of research should be to advance the human condition, not an agenda.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spoke at the World Food Prize event the same day the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced $120 million in grants to bring a green revolution to sub-Saharan Africa. We agree with his comments on the real dangers of the divide between those who support increased productivity, and those who promote sustainability.

"It's a false choice," he said. "It blocks important advances. It breeds hostility among people who need to work together. And it makes it hard to launch a comprehensive program to help poor farmers.

"We certainly need both productivity and sustainability, and there is no reason we can't have both."