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The prime mover

Idealog July/August, page 54. Photograph by Peter Drury/Waikato Times

Andy West is charged with giving Kiwi farmers the scientific edge on their competitors—and all on a No 8 wire budget. Aaron Smale speaks to the outspoken boss of AgResearch

In 1982, after completing his doctorate in microbial ecology, Englishman Andrew West headed down under for a working holiday, keen to do some tramping in New Zealand’s famed outdoors.

He’s still here. More than 20 years and several career incarnations later, he landed the top job as chief executive at AgResearch—a return to his first love.

“I trained in a primary industries R&D lab in England and loved the work,” he says. “I enjoy working with farmers—I admire their entrepreneurial spirit. And I love science.”

But he didn’t feel the love when he first arrived at New Zealand’s leading agricultural research centre. Retired soil scientist Mike O’Connor, who had clocked up 40 years at AgResearch by the time he left just over a year ago, recalls that staff were suffering from funding-cut shell-shock when West walked in the door.

The cuts “were disastrous for staff morale,” O’Connor says. “Numbers dropped considerably. Good scientists got disheartened and left for overseas or other jobs.”

While he couldn’t restore the funding, West soon improved staff confidence. “His moves towards disbanding an internal restructuring in AgResearch and retaining the status quo gave staff a very positive belief in him,” says O’Connor. “He also got AgResearch back to emphasising the importance of science.”

But it wasn’t easy. “The biggest struggle was that the country had decided that agriculture was a sunset industry when, in fact, it is a key part of our future,” West says. “The consequences of New Zealand losing faith in its comparative and competitive advantages have been the abandonment of agriculture courses by students and a massive 70 percent cut in on-farm R&D funding by the taxpayer. There are signs now that both factors are reversing, but it’s still early days.”

With the government providing around 60 percent of the funding that AgResearch receives, West is careful not to bite the hand that feeds. But he does point out that, compared with overseas countries with similar economies, New Zealand is lagging behind in its funding of R&D.

“We invest 1.2 percent of our GDP in R&D,” he says. “Ideally, I’d like us to invest the same amount as Denmark—2.5 percent. I’d like 1.5 from the private sector and one percent from the government. But what are the chances of that happening when everyone is putting money into houses and land? Zero.

“I’ve been in science policy since 1988. We’ve talked about raising science investment since then and we never have. Other OECD countries are doing it and they are leaving us behind.”

It’s this diet of dust, West says, that at times leads to AgResearch stepping on a few toes—including those of its masters. “We’re always pushing boundaries, trying to do new things, new ways and that can frustrate them,” he says. “At the same time I think there is genuine satisfaction that we’ve refocused on farming. I think there is respect for what we’re doing and trying to do.”

That is for AgResearch to live up to its name and focus on agricultural research. The organisation has set an agenda to double the value of the sheep and dairy industries while halving the environmental damage they cause by 2020. West believes these goals are feasible, pointing to the performance of the sheep industry over the last decade or so.

“You look at lamb: 20 years ago it was a rubbish product. Everyone was scared of [competing with] chicken. Now we couldn’t care less what the bloody price of chicken is—it’s irrelevant.”

These days lamb fetches some of the highest prices per kilogram for any meat product in European supermarkets, and New Zealand exports 15 percent more lamb by weight than it did 20 years ago, even with 30 million fewer sheep. Much of that success has been achieved with science—from genetic improvements in sheep to better ways of processing and packaging.

West sees this high-value path on both sides of the farm gate as being one that other primary producers must go down—or we risk losing out to cheaper competitors like South America. He believes AgResearch is at the forefront of this movement.

For starters, AgResearch is investing heavily to get the wool market out of the doldrums—starting with the recent $20 million acquisition of Canesis, an R&D company that specialises in wool and other textiles. “The key is to reposition wool as an elite material and textile base in the eyes of wealthy consumers, like we did with lamb,” says West.

AgResearch is increasingly a launch pad for ideas that take flight in the private sector. While focusing on agriculture, some of its research can turn up unlikely and surprising results. In the week Idealog spoke to West, he’d just announced a technology that had the ability to detect explosives in luggage—an idea with obvious potential in the post-9/11 world.

And the management of such ideas is starting to pay nicely—AgResearch doubled its revenue from licensing intellectual property last year. The sale of AgVax, a subsidiary that develops livestock drenches, for an undisclosed sum was reportedly the biggest windfall for a Crown Research Institute.

2006 also saw the start of six joint ventures, adding to the considerable number AgResearch already has on its books. These are in areas as diverse as a technology that can detect the smallest of pests in shipping containers and a biological coating that can increase the shelf-life of fruit for up to 12 months.

“I’m not a fan of turning New Zealand into a giant retirement and vacation theme park with a large, low-wage, semi-skilled service sector and a small elite of ultra-rich capitalists”

West says joint ventures are a good way to get a technology to market with partners that can take it further than AgResearch on its own, through factors such as marketing ability and access to greater capital. Many are private sector investors.

“The transaction costs on winning private sector money tend to be a lot less than winning government money,” West says. “But the lifeblood of a research organisation is still government money for long-term research.”

If he is oblique in his criticism of the government’s investment in R&D, he’s not so coy about the miserly investment that New Zealand society, and farmers in particular, puts into science and technology.

“Farmers bid up the land price and they deny Fonterra the access to capital that it needs to build brands.

“When you put all your capital into that space you’re not a knowledge economy, you’re a lifestyle economy where people want to come and buy your land to retire on … you become a low-wage service economy to rich retirees, the Bahamas of the South Pacific.

“If New Zealand doesn’t continue to be the world’s best pastoral farming nation, then this economy and society—and my young kids—face some real problems. I’m not a fan of turning New Zealand into a giant retirement and vacation theme park with a large, low-wage, semi-skilled service sector and a small elite of ultra-rich capitalists.

“And that’s a very serious risk. Unless we are really serious about knowledge and take our R&D investment up to 2.5 percent [of GDP] and start putting our capital into high-tech, high-risk companies, what’s the alternative? I don’t see one.”

1 comment

Mike from Christchurch

2007-08-11 08:58:51

Excellent interview that makes me want to hear much more of what this interesting man has to say. How good it would be to see more research success stories trumpeted in our news media, and the importance of R&D funding instilled into schoolchildren instead of all the PC bullshit they are at present being subjected to.

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