Future funding for agricultural research uncertain : Nature NewsFinancial donors to a global network of 15 agricultural research centres want changes to the way the influential group plans to reshape its research programme. The tensions, voiced at a conference in Montpellier, France, raise questions over future funding for the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR), which supports thousands of scientists working on agriculture and food security in developing countries.Debate over the CGIAR's future direction and funding reforms is a key part of this week's Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development, where the world's major agricultural research funders, scientists and research users, including farmers, are thrashing out a new direction for the area, helping to set national and international research agendas.The CGIAR is expecting its centres' combined budget to increase from about US$500 million today to $1 billion in five to ten years. The lion's share of that funding comes from financial donors that include government agencies in the United States and United Kingdom, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But donors have yet to make firm commitments to the budget increase  ” which hinges on wide-reaching organizational changes voted for in December 2009, and on a new research strategy currently up for discussion. The Montpellier conference marks their first chance to influence the CGIAR's research plan, a key draft of which was released on 20 March.  Under the proposed reforms, donor contributions would go into a common pot, which would then be distributed among eight broad research areas, or 'mega programmes'. These include 'climate change and agriculture' and 'mobilizing agricultural biodiversity for food security and resilience'. (By contrast, donors currently fund individual centres directly, either through specific projects or as a lump sum.) The idea is to cut out research overlap between centres, create a clear mission and refocus research on the questions and problems donors want tackled. Donors say that they want this reform process accelerated, and to see more flesh on the bones of the outlined research proposals. In particular, they want to see three fast-tracked research programmes launched by the end of the year, including one on the impact of climate change on agriculture, says Jonathan Wadsworth, senior agricultural research adviser to Britain's Department for International Development (DFID).DFID is one of the centre's largest donors, and has said that it wants to double funding to the group in future. But Wadsworth told  Nature  that funding hikes will depend on the reforms, and on the centres achieving their research targets. As the reforms speed up, funding will increase, he says. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private foundation, contributes around $80 million per year to the CGIAR's budget and has committed funding to the centres until 2013. Prabhu Pingali, deputy director of the foundation's agriculture development division, says future commitments will depend on the centres focusing their research on a core set of well-defined problems that need to be tackled, rather than the proposed broad programmes. 
If you just have broad programme themes, this is not reform, he told  Nature. Rather, he suggests, the proposals should be more specific: for example, research on how to increase the productivity of stress-tolerant rice in Asia, and to identify the management and policy infrastructures required to encourage farmers to adopt these crops.    There is some truth in Pingali's criticisms, says Colin Chartres, director general of the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka, one of the CGIAR's centres. But he says that he and others developing the reforms have deliberately not presented specific ideas so that the conference participants, including farmers, can have input into the strategy. For us this is an early stage in the reform process, although the donors think we have been at it for a while, he says. Carlos Pérez del Castillo, chair of the CGIAR's consortium board, which was set up as part of management reforms and now oversees the group's centres and discusses funding with donors, told a press briefing that changes would be made to the mega programmes to incorporate concerns expressed at the conference. In particular, the CGIAR would focus research on specific regions, and target the more vulnerable groups of people for its programmes. Proposals to focus research on maize (corn), rice and wheat would be broadened to include other crops such as beans and cassava. A meeting on 24 May will decide which of the broad programmes will be the first to be put to donors for funding decisions, Pérez del Castillo added. Chartres thinks that donors will be able to see detailed proposals for three programmes by October.