Without a profound shift in thinking, science will be a barrier rather than a change agent in the European food system. Reform in eastern Europe and Ukraine is the canary in the mine.
The idea of science and technology as agriculture’s saviour is commonplace across the political spectrum. But fewer people talk about the profound changes needed in the way it is planned and implemented if it is to serve as a support, rather than a barrier, to transformation. The concentration of official interest in basically two scientific institutions, INRAE and Waginingen Research, is symbolic of the problem given they are thousands of km away from major production centers in eastern Europe where know-how is most needed. Meanwhile, intriguing pilot programs, such as ‘Romanian Extension Education Program’ (REEP), which partners with the University of Georgia in the USA, are envisioning models for delivering local agricultural science and extension services that are largely unknown in Brussels.
Given the constant murmur about sovereignty, it is ironic that American academic expertise sits behind new ways of organizing. But it is not surprising. When science is discussed at the EU level, the policy community obsesses over topics like artificial intelligence as they relate to industrial policy in western European countries. Eastern Europe, let alone farming, doesn’t get the attention.
European programs such as T0PAGRI (Towards zer0 Pesticide AGRIculture: European Network for sustainability) gesture in the right direction. But limited budgets mean they can be little more than networking and information exchange, which in my view is already adequate as scientists are easily connected due to electronic communication and online translation tools. Instead, new scientific programs of research and extension are needed that produce concrete results.
While there are underpinning moves to renovate buildings and improve facilities in relevant scientific institutions, such as Croatia’s Institute for Adriatic Crops, these often happen by chance as part of other initiatives and are therefore difficult to detect let alone shepherd into a coherent whole. Overall, engagement with EU programs is highly variable. The situation requires us to think through how we could scale substantive programs and an array of potential change agents across hundreds of public scientific institutions that would, if adequately mobilized, help us transform the food system.
Legacy R&D systems
The REEP project in Romania is interesting in this regard because it claims to be patching together agricultural universities established during the Ceausescu dictatorship into something resembling the American land grant university system, which some experts argue underpinned US agriculture. The project is led by Romanians who believe it offers a proving ground for reform of similar systems in post-Soviet countries like Ukraine. While the budget is miniscule and the eventual outcome of the program cannot be known, it is an intellectual step forward. CAP has been awful news for Romania’s small family farms and while public systems of science and extension services targeted at them will obviously not ameliorate all of the damage done, these kinds of institution-building projects ought to be on the menu.
But the wider problem, to paraphrase Gramsci, is that Europe is trapped in the interregnum between the old system of science focused on productivism and agrochemicals and a much needed new system that would support decarbonization and environmental protection. The interregnum is unwelcoming to new approaches and poor at grasping, let alone supporting, change agents.
The scientific institutions built up through the late 19th and early 20th century in Ukraine and across eastern Europe including large member states such as Romania suffered funding cuts after 1989/1991 and in many places lost political legitimacy as the old collectivised agro-industrial complexes fell apart. For its part, relevant scientific infrastructure of similar vintage in western Europe drifted off the political radar and public funding was scaled back due to privatisation and abandonment of explicit productivist policies.
Ukraine as the crucial test case
The main show in town when it comes to EU policy debate on the Ukraine grain regions has been the German-Ukraine agricultural dialogue (APD) funded by the German government since 2006. Analysis on behalf of the dialogue by Olga Khodakivska in 2019 took a view favorable to breaking up Ukraine’s legacy agricultural research system which cross-subsidizes academic activities with commercial production. Instead, the plan would be to build a ‘pure play’ research system funded by grants and consultancy fees. The plan has logic but it was more or less implemented in other parts of eastern Europe in the past with devastating financial consequences. There was little grant and consultancy income going around while the profits from land sales were not put back into science.
It is understandable, therefore, that a similar proposal was extremely controversial among members of the Ukrainian agrarian academy that undertakes agricultural research and extension. It “dispossesses” them of all their facilities, except for buildings and the small amount of surrounding land, without a viable alternative strategy to obtain experimental plots such as by rental from farmers. The result is complete inability to conduct mission-critical research at the necessary scale. “What, are we going to conduct experiments in flowerpots, on asphalt?” Adamchuk Valeri, an agricultural engineer, said in response to Ukrainian government plans during a press conference held last year.
He and his colleagues argued that the plans undermined the entire science and research enterprise in Ukraine as well as support for smaller-scale farmers who scientists had been nurturing with professional knowledge and materials tailored to local farming needs. This would leave Ukraine dependent on importing all inputs to production, presumably from western multinationals, without the ability to innovate itself. Nataliya Bunyak, a prominent agricultural engineer, made clear that her institute was cross subsidizing science, research and extension activities with income from the commercial sale of seeds. She said that if that supplement was taken away, central government funding was insufficient.
Despite its potential consequences, this dispute has not received attention in the international scientific press. The destruction of public sector science and attacks on Ukraine’s sovereign capacity are not directly at Russian hands, but have more complex authors, and therefore fit awkwardly in the main story-line. Ukrainian agricultural research tends to be analyzed according to a western European framework and found wanting. Policy recommendations from outside the country seem to boil down to mass sackings in the public research institutions. The drastic reform of East German scientific institutes after German reunification in 1991 is explicitly referenced even though the limitations of that process have subsequently come to light such as the philistine views of some West German officials and the chaotic haste in which it was done.
Last September, the German-backed APD held a conference inaugurating the expansion of the EU’s ‘Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems’ (AKIS) framework to Ukraine including a website and potential progress indicators. There is no doubt the EU will want to impose Brussels policy frameworks onto Ukraine. However, there are questions about whether this is the best option. It runs the risk of diverting policymakers away from actual institution-building into supporting a bewildering array of networking schemes that leave little political footprint when project funding dries up.
The AKIS concept has been bouncing around European agricultural policy for decades at least in its modern form since 2008, but few have asked if it is actually shaping the agricultural system in the ways needed. The narrow scope of AKIS is, arguably, absurd. Historical evidence suggests that key agricultural innovations spilled-over from other industrial sectors while, even within agriculture, innovations rarely emerged at a national level but from a mix of different countries.
Above all, AKIS leaves power relations untouched. By owning a network of grain storage facilities, a handful of managers in a multinational agricultural commodity trading firm can completely reorder the innovation economy due to their hold over grain flows, while an honest official, let alone a smallholder, would have little chance, even if they were an Einstein. This runs up against active effort by APD to coach Ukrainian interlocutors into an expanded mechanism of lobbying for industrial agriculture in Brussels.
Left as it is, the EU bureaucracy, drawing on national systems of innovation doctrines originally developed in places like OECD, might have completely misunderstood what is actually taking place. AKIS might have some value as a way for bureaucrats to curate relevant organizations but it is not a vision for transforming institutions. Yet there is a great danger of exactly this expectation being put upon it if it is rigidly imposed on Ukraine and eastern member states.
Tripping over Uncle Sam
The European Commission has to find a niche between US government operators, the World Bank and agromultinationals like Bayer, Cargill and Corteva who all offer their own versions of ‘technical assistance’.
The Romanian project envisages US land grant universities as organizational models and mobilizes the Romanian diaspora to deliver the message. But America is also able to draw on its more dramatic transformation paradigms such as the ‘Green Revolution’ and ‘mission-oriented innovation’ projects by the Rockefeller Foundation like rice breeding. While revisionist scholars severely question the claims made about these American programmes, it is easy to imagine political leaders making rousing speeches about ‘fostering a new generation of scientific geniuses to spearhead the next green revolution’.
The Trump administration abolished USAID which was historically the largest single donor in the region but was also lockstep with American agricultural interests. USAID’s 250m USD ‘Harvest Activity’ in Ukraine explicitly sought increases in the deployment of ‘Crop Protection Products’ for commodity crops such as sunflowers, citing an archived ‘APS’ document dated July 2024. In common with other USAID programs it bypassed established local expertise like agricultural scientists that might have raised objections.
Given USAID’s electronic paper-trail disappeared it is now difficult to find more. But the overall strategy is not in doubt as regards the opening up of Ukrainian agriculture to American methods. Even during the Biden administration, a report from the Harvard-Kennedy School, which apparently incorporated intellectual input from USAID officials, took a lukewarm view of USAID aligning its agricultural programs with EU objectives.
A shift of mindset
If policymakers are ever to escape the legacy of the past, a new European system of agricultural science and extension services will need its center of gravity where agriculture matters most in the economy, notably in the east of the continent. The new system would need to be agile enough to respond to both problems arising from the impacts of climate change as well as strategic issues related to farm profitability, agronomy, decontamination of land and water and control of pollution. This requires a significant shift in EU thinking away from current rigid models like AKIS.
Policies ostensibly related to the food supply have become symbols of great power politics while the endgame that the great powers seek for Ukraine is, as yet, unconfirmed. In situations like this, where democratic accountability has been rejected, you cannot sugar coat how bad the situation could become. The open question is what is in reach for those with a more humane vision of the food system. Science typically offers a low-key resource for diplomacy and, perhaps, more than that, if lucky. There is a risk the Brussels bureaucracy has not understood the stakes and is once again falling into old policy traps.
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