Dramatic cuts to UK foreign aid budgets undermine global research partnerships

Dramatic cuts to UK foreign aid budgets have left the future of hundreds of research projects in developing countries hanging in the balance and trusted partnerships severely undermined, say leading scientists.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) announced on 11 March that its international development budget for 2021/22 had been reduced from £245 million to £125 million as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19, leaving a "£120 million gap between allocations and commitments".

It says more than 800 projects will be affected by the cuts, which will see grants such as those awarded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and Newton Fund significantly reduced or, in some cases, terminated.

Nick Talbot, executive director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, said it was a "massive breach of trust" to cut ongoing projects of real impact for developing countries. He said he faced a "major cut" to a GCRF project grant in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Talbot, a world-renowned expert in molecular plant pathology, leads a project on rice blast, a disease that can devastate rice yields, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where disease-resistant varieties are lacking and control strategies limited.

Our project has examined the rice blast pathogen population and provided information on the resistance genes that could defend rice varieties grown locally from infection. We have used plant breeding to introduce multiple diseases resistance into locally grown varieties favoured by farmers and consumers in Sub-Saharan Africa."

Nick Talbot, Executive Director, Sainsbury Laboratory

The UK team works with partners in Nairobi who house a disease repository and oversee local breeding work, said Talbot, as well as scientists in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Tanzania, and Madagascar.

"It is a highly complex project and we have trained many African scientists, including PhD students. We have rice varieties in field trials across 17 sites in Africa, and our next stage will be to bring some of the varieties to registration and release to farmers.We need about three to four years' further funding to achieve this, but the cut we have received puts a lot of that in jeopardy."

Talbot said he was doing all he could to maintain partner budgets in Sub-Saharan Africa, but admitted he did not know how he would implement such a deep cut, adding that the exact amount remained under discussion. "It's heartbreaking for such a successful project to be affected like this," he said.

In an online briefing, the UKRI says it is working with stakeholders to discuss "the best way forward". "No one could have foreseen the economic impact of an extended global pandemic when we entered into these longer-term programmes," it says.

Scientists have mobilised in their thousands to sign petitions calling for the British government to revoke the cuts.

"The decimation of this vital funding stream will have drastic impacts," says enni Barclay, a professor of volcanology at the University of East Anglia who authored the letter, said her immediate response was one of "abject horror". "I cannot believe that the UK government understood what it was doing to 'global Britain' by this unprecedented action — to cancel competitively funded projects, or cut others so thoroughly, it's difficult to see how momentum and trust can be sustained."

Asked to respond to the petitions, a spokeswoman for the UK's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: "We are working with our delivery partners, including UK Research and Innovation, to implement a new research and development settlement for 2021/22 as part of our wider commitment to maintain the UK's world-class reputation for science, research and innovation."

When patients go to the clinic for treatment — also partially funded through the project — they are invited to contribute to the study, with thousands of children expected to receive malaria treatment, regardless of whether they take part, said Lawniczak. All that is now at risk, she fears.

"When you are awarded a grant, you would never think that a cut could come after the award has been made, especially not such a dramatic one," added Lawniczak. She said her research partner in Mali, Abdoulaye Djimde, felt "helpless" about the situation. "If this was a new collaboration and the rug was pulled out from under it like this, why would partners in [low- and middle-income countries] ever want to work with us again? They have invested in this project — people, time, resources, brain power — built on a foundation of trust that the funding is there."