In 1969 the world watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a human on the Moon, ending a decade-long, $24 billion space race ($150 billion in today’s dollars). We need investment on a similar scale to fund research that addresses the biggest challenge facing the United States in the next 30 years: food and energy security.
Today, we face growing and economically empowered nations, energy-intensive global economies, and major shifts in global climate that together constitute the perfect storm for agriculture. Yet plant-science research has been underfunded for decades—and funding is projected to shrink.
In 2012 the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that some 920 million people—one-eighth of the world’s population—do not have enough food to meet their daily caloric intake target, and the world’s population continues to expand. Last year world population passed the 7 billion mark, and the ...
