Research fears arise as government turns screw
Britain's food manufacturing research community has expressed serious concerns about central funding drying up as the financial screw on government departmental spending is turned.
Academic food researchers and private research centres have expressed worries that core research once managed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is being marginalised.
Institutions such as Campden & Chorleywood Food Research Association and Leatherhead Food International are concentrating on their areas of specialism and collaborating to avoid competing for increasingly scarce government grants.
"It's not that DEFRA aren't interested, they just don't have any money," claimed one leading academic, who said Unilever's decision to move aspects of its research overseas had diminished its influence with the government.
"One of the worries is that the DEFRA system of funding worked reasonably well; but one of the things being proposed is to hand the whole thing over to the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) [a government body outside of DEFRA]," said the source. He was concerned that TSB's main areas of interest were not food related.
There is a need for a new body to take charge of food research funding, he added: "Especially given what's happening in terms of food security and so forth: nobody's given a toss about it for 30 years and all of a sudden we are going to run out.
"It would clearly be useful if some sort of Link partially government-funded collaborative industrial/academic research funding schemes were carried on because the UK [research community] have found them useful," he said. "If you just handed it over to an organisation that was most interested in aerospace then you are going to have problems. It's messy, to be honest."
