"The Netherlands must set the example for Spain's agro-food R&D"

The Netherlands, constrained by a scarcity of suitable agricultural land, has managed to remain the world's second largest exporter thanks to its focus on R&D, to which it devotes 15% of its turnover, allowing it to breed almost triple the number of plants of the second most noteworthy state and accounting for 48% of the EU total. For its part, Spain has become the EU's fourth largest food exporter and the eighth in the world, with a sector that generates about 21% of the induced industrial GDP, but which is constrained by devoting only 0.21 % of its turnover to R&D and relying on public aid to reach 0.61%, with less than 3% of the plant breedings in Europe.

"We cannot compete in terms of company size or costs, so we should be doing it in training and innovation; in intelligence. We have top researchers (the third in the world in number of publications), but we rank 19th when it comes to the number of patents, with a food sector that received the most funds for R&D in 2015, but for which innovation is still a minor activity," stated Jorge Jordana, patron director of the agro-food department of Fundación Lafer, and for many years director of the Spanish food union FIAB.

Jordana, however, described a picture that wasn't as grim, marked by a commitment to innovation in line with the EU average, with a higher percentage of innovative firms than in other sectors generating 92,000 million Euro in sales and nearly half a million direct jobs. A "miracle in a country that has reduced the aid for R&D during the recession by 35%, (while Germany increased it by 18%), or which granted no aid to new research projects in 2013," he lamented.

And the impact of the cuts resulting from the recession and the struggle to contain the deficit is aggravated by the loss of strategic European resources called to be catalysts for innovation in the agricultural sector. Spain, as also reported by Jordana, is the only Member State which has not yet have working Operational Groups for Agricultural Innovation, approved in the last reform of the CAP for the period 2014-2020. In fact, the funds for rural development approved for the period, totalling 45 million Euro, as well as dozens of projects involving many companies linked to the primary sector with little or no experience in innovation, are in danger of being lost.

Biovegen provided a contrasting view of this reality, presented by a Spanish scientist whose work has been recognised by one of the most prestigious universities of the planet, that of Wageningen. At Plant Research International, Gabino Sánchez Pérez is currently running several projects on plant breeding supported by public-private partnerships and strong investments from multinationals in the field. Sánchez described the "technological revolution" taking place in the Netherlands which is allowing for the development of new tools in plant biology for the breeding of new varieties.

"Automatic phenotyping, for which drones or mobile applications are now used; the use of doubled haploid, which makes it possible to save embryos; genome editing; the selection of molecular markers and the new sequencing technologies (infinitely cheaper than those available five years ago), as well as the processing of these data with applied bioinformatics, will allow us to reduce (by many years) the time needed to obtain varieties almost a la carte," said this senior researcher specialised in bioinformatics.

A good example of the advances derived from the study of DNA is the line of work that has managed to recover some tomato varieties (today reduced to a small number of elite cultivars which were the result of decades of research and improvement) from samples taken from herbaria of the nineteenth or even the sixteenth century. "We can scrutinise the history of the domestication of the tomato, take tiny samples of those still 'living' historical documents present in herbaria and sequence the genomes of the samples we find, analysing the evolution of related genes, for example, in the field of resistance to pathogens, and thus facilitating crossings with genomically compatible plants," said the researcher.

Biovegen, which is chaired by the Valencian agronomist José Pellicer, is a public-private partnership that brings together 53 companies devoted to plant breeding, production, agro nutrients, pesticides and biotech services, among other activities, and 12 research centres. Its goal is to improve the competitiveness of the Spanish food sector by incorporating new technologies based on plant biology.