As the negotiations continue around the 2018 Farm Bill—the giant piece of federal legislation that covers everything from food stamps to farm subsidies to agricultural research—Congress is considering whether to continue funding a little known government-funded project, which calls itself “the people’s foundation.”
Created by Congress in 2014, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research was given $200 million in taxpayer funds and a mandate to find matching donations to advance the research mission of the USDA. The foundation wants another $200 million from the new Farm Bill, telling lawmakers that the FFAR is funding scientific research that can help give “every person access to affordable, nutritious food grown on thriving farms.”
But a close look at FFAR’s work to date shows that the foundation is steering tens of millions of taxpayer dollars toward research with some of the richest corporate agribusiness firms (General Mills, Syngenta, and ADM), raising questions over who “the people’s foundation” is serving.
FFAR is steering tens of millions of taxpayer dollars toward research with some of the richest corporate agribusiness firms.
In 2017, FFAR pooled $800,000 in taxpayer dollars with matching funds from Merck for research aimed at developing a robotic vaccination device to be used on the largest poultry operations (those producing one million or more chicks per week). FFAR co-funded a $1 million project carried out by Recombinetics to engineer pigs that are genetically castrated. Syngenta and Bayer are partnering with FFAR on more than a million dollars in research projects into honeybee health declines—widely linked to the pesticides these companies sell.
FFAR has also poured more than $15 million into projects with the Gates Foundation, the richest philanthropy in the world, with most of this money going toward a seed breeding project aimed at engineering new GMO crops. The deputy director of Gates’ agricultural program, who previously administered public-private partnerships at Monsanto, sits on the board of directors at FFAR, alongside Cargill, PepsiCo, and the National Corn Growers Association.
In total, around $25 milion of the FFAR’s research funding to date has gone to projects with private businesses, about 40 percent of its awarded grants.
Sally Rockey, the head of FFAR, says in an interview that her foundation’s industry partnerships are generating “scientifically sound” research that benefits the private sector and public sector alike. FFAR has created the largest soil health initiative in the United States, Rockey boasts, a $19 million project that has matching funds from foundations and also Monsanto, General Mills, and Nestle-Purina. And its project with the Gates Foundation, Rockey says, is doing groundbreaking research into higher-yielding crops.
Rockey describes FFAR’s programming as “hugely successful,” and points to 125 organizations that support its continued funding. But many of these organizations, including the Fertilizer Institute, CropLife, and the American Seed Trade Association, are closely aligned with agribusiness interests. And it was industry groups, like the Animal Health Institute (representing animal pharmaceutical interests), that helped bring FFAR to life, lobbying Congress as far back as 2012.
And though FFAR boasts of working with “diverse” stakeholders, its research efforts aren’t reaching all corners of the food system, according to Qiana Mickie, executive director of Just Food, a nonprofit that works on community-based food systems.
Mickie said she heard about FFAR through colleagues who were upset over a $1 million urban agriculture grant FFAR put toward a project with the private company AeroFarms to develop indoor, vertical lettuce farming—a high-tech project that won’t end up feeding under-resourced people in urban communities, Mickie says. (News reports describe AeroFarm’s products as “pricey, niche products.”)
“It hit a red flag for me,” Mickie says, noting that though any group can apply for FFAR funding in theory, the matching-funds model “inherently cuts out the majority of folks that could access that money,”
Rockey defends the AeroFarms project, saying it helps fulfill FFAR’s vision for urban agriculture, “to grow enough high-quality, nutritious food for an urban population.” She also points to other urban agriculture projects FFAR supports that she says work community groups, including the Community Foundation of Greater Flint in Michigan.
FFAR’s funding model parallels several other foundations created by Congress to inspire private sector support of research—the CDC Foundation, the FDA’s Reagan-Udall Foundation, and the Foundation of the NIH—which have generated controversy around financial ties to Big Pesticide, Big Pharma, and Big Soda. A blockbuster New York Times article in March reported on a planned NIH study into the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption, which was funded by beer companies through its private foundation.
While lawmakers and journalists scrutinize the financial conflicts of interest emerging from these foundations, the FFAR has carried out its work in relative obscurity, operating with little outside oversight. The USDA, which has three non-voting representatives on FFAR’s board, said in an email it plays a role in “evaluating project proposals” but would not elaborate on how it ensures FFAR contributes to USDA’s research mission. Some stakeholders in the food system aren’t sure that it is.
“It’s a much larger trend of public research moving into public-private, or pay-to-play.”
“It’s a much larger trend . . . a trend of more and more of what used to be public research moving into public-private, or pay-to-play,” says Michael Sligh, a program director at the Rural Advancement Foundation International. “I think that taxpayer dollars should go to public research and that should benefit the public broadly.”
Sligh, like many sources for this article, notes that increasing private-sector influence over agricultural research, such as with FFAR, is related to eroding federal support for research. His organization advocates for more federal research funding at the USDA.
Currently, FFAR’s online grants database reports handing out more around $65 million in taxpayer dollars for research. Most projects are carried out by universities, and matching funders include companies, industry groups, foundations and universities. A wide body of research shows that industry funding of research can introduce bias into science, for example steering researchers away from questions that might be critical of sponsors.
A thorough analysis of FFAR’s work, however, is challenging. One $15 million grant was recently corrected to show it was a $1.5 million grant; a different grant from 2017 didn’t show up in FFAR’s records until last week; some grants don’t list any matching funders or the amounts that each funder gives.
And according to an interview with FFAR (granted after two weeks of repeated requests), $90 million of the foundation’s funding commitments have yet to be “officially issued” and don’t show up in its awards database.
From what records are publicly available on FFAR’s website, it is easier to find FFAR partnering with large companies than with stakeholders promoting alternative production models, though some examples exist.
The organic food industry is one of the fastest growing food sectors, yet FFAR acknowledged in an interview that it has not funded any research projects uniquely looking at organic production. And organic companies appear to play an extremely small role in FFAR, an exception being the yogurt company Stonyfield, which supports FFAR and sits on an advisory board.
FFAR is working with The Land Institute, a nonprofit research body in Kansas, to fund a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student’s research into perennial grains, which can continue to produce food for a decade or more, saving farmers all the costs of having to replant every year.
Still, the Land Institute is not a full-throated supporter of Congress giving another $200 million to the foundation.
“If those are 200 million dollars that would not otherwise be spent on agricultural research, then I would say we support it,” says Fred Iutzi, president of the Land Institute. But if the choice is between putting that funding into FFAR or “a really effective, pure public program” at the USDA, he’d choose the latter.
“The whole reason to have a public sector presence [in agricultural research] is because the public interest sometimes requires pursuing things that are not clearly profitable yet, to open those areas up,” he says.
Meanwhile, the most clearly profitable agribusinesses, which probably have the least need for research funding, are claiming a sizable share of FFAR’s grants. Archer Daniel Midlands is a FFAR partner on two matching grants worth more than $2 million total, including one that will use “eye-tracking to better understand” consumer food purchasing behavior.
The FFAR matched $1 million from biotechnology companies and other sources for “chemistry-driven gene discovery.” The research that emerged, however, appears aimed at a completely different topic, how scientists can better communicate the benefits of GMOs, to “improve crop yields and minimize impacts on the environment.”
GMO companies play a prominent role at FFAR. Bayer has contributed as much as $249,999 to the foundation. FFAR’s senior scientific program director previously worked for Monsanto, and the director of its Crops of the Future Collaborative previously worked for Dow Agrosciences.
Tim Schwab is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C., whose work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The New Food Economy, Undark, PLoSONE, The Progressive and other publications. He previously worked as a researcher for a nonprofit advocacy group called Food & Water Watch, where his work included a brief, critical examination of FFAR’s ties to corporate agribusinesses.