Stein W Bie

Director-General, ISNAR,
The Hague, The Netherlands

Perspective

The future of agricultural expertise

I have a concern about the faculties of agriculture in universities or agricultural universities both in developing countries and in industrialized countries. If you go back a generation, when I went to university, you would see that all over the world some of the very best school leavers went into agricultural science. Today, when agriculture plays a smaller role in national economies, particularly in industrialized countries, you will see that the best school leavers go into information technology. They go into business administration. They go into biotechnology. In developing countries many farmers strive hard to ensure that their children get the education that the older generation could never dream of. When these children become school leavers and turn to their parents for advice on where to proceed with further education, they are unlikely to be advised to go into agriculture. Farmer parents in developing countries mention biotechnology, information science and business management before they suggest agriculture. Industrialized and developing countries have this in common: what we have to do is to make sure that when the young people have finished their basic education in business management, biotechnology or information technology, they start applying their skills to the agricultural challenge.

Many of the scientific challenges that small farmers face in the field constitute enormously interesting research topics but, very often, university people haven't been looking at them. They have been looking at more theoretical things. But, once they start to look over the hedge that borders the university campus, to note the invasion of a pest or a virus in a crop, it turns out that the links to, say, basic biotechnology or information science, are very close.

My feeling is that agricultural university training will more and more become post-graduate training. And in that field I believe that bio-technologists, information scientists and modern business managers will find challenges that are of the same order of magnitude - and I hope in the future also paid as well - as those that they will find in their pharmaceutical industry, with the telephone companies or with the business world in general. We have to make sure that agriculture gets the best brain power and, at the moment, I see some nasty signs on the horizon. In the international community we have to work very hard to ensure that we can retain the best brains to one of the biggest challenges that mankind has got.

ISNAR (International Service for National Agricultural Research)

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