Funding program for agricultural research turns 10

The 10th anniversary of a program that has provided constant funding to lengthy agricultural research and allowed scientists to focus on the nation's strategic needs was marked by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences on Thursday.

The Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Program was inaugurated in 2013 with support from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

CAAS President Wu Kongming told a news conference in Beijing on Thursday that it usually took more than a decade to see results from agricultural research and agricultural researchers had previously found themselves in an inferior position when competing for funding.

He said the stable financing offered by the program had freed agricultural researchers from having to compete for funding with other types of studies offering immediate results. That meant they could align their research with the country's long-term and practical needs, and avoid being "shortsighted".

"Over the past decade, the academy has made breakthroughs in a range of basic, strategic and cutting-edge fields," Wu said.

Thanks to the program, CAAS had published 16 papers in the science journals Cell, Nature and Science as the first author in the past five years, he said.

In the past decade, it had established a three-level system consisting of 283 research directions in 58 subject areas under 11 disciplines, basically covering all areas of agricultural research, and had reshuffled its research groups into 330 research teams to conduct research based on the nation's needs.