The farming and environmental sectors have lamented the restructuring of Rothamsted Research Institute as a heavy blow to the development of sustainable agricultural practices in the UK. On Tuesday (2nd August) Prospect, the union representing environmental scientists and agriculturalists, released a statement condemning the 20 per cent cuts to research, which it says will predominantly affect agroecological study.

Rothamsted Research Institiute is based in Hertfordshire, but has research stations throughout the South, in Suffolk and Devon. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), which funds the institute, has said it must reduce its expenditure by 20 per cent.

Prospect reported that the funding cuts to the institute could result in a loss of 85 posts from the April 2011 staffing levels of 427 at three sites. Professor Maurice Moloney, Rothamsted's Director, made clear the losses will fall mainly in the area of crop protection including herbicide resistance, eelworm research and sugar beet research.

Scientists at Rothamsted Research have said they accept that the institute cannot be immune to the current programme of cuts in public spending. However, Prospect indicated that in 2000 the-then Institute of Arable Crops Research employed some 900 staff across three sites. A new round of staff cuts will bring the overall number of people employed to less than 350; a loss of two thirds of the staff engaged in arable research since 2000, a figure which flies in the face of calls for more research to combat climate change and threats to food security.

Nigel Titchen, president of Prospect, which represents staff at all three Rothamsted sites, commented on the BBSRC's decision, "Despite rising food prices and global issues of crop security and climate change it appears that BBSRC's mandate to focus on food security is just empty rhetoric.

"The work that will be lost is of direct relevance to British farmers in their struggle to develop sustainable systems as they face the twin challenges of climate change and the economic downturn. Once lost, the intellectual expertise represented by these dedicated scientists will be impossible to replace."

In July, when the "streamlining measures" were first announced, they were heavily criticised by the NFU and farming industry and environmentalists alike. The measures go against the recommendation of groups such as the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), who have championed research into more sustainable methods and conducted research which demonstrates the importance of ecological farming techniques; the FAO's Special Rapporteur, Olivier de Schutter, has expressed the need to "identify public policies that could scale up these sustainable and promising approaches."

Gm Freeze pointed out that news of the cuts comes less than two years after the Royal Society reported that several core agroecological disciplines are in "decline" and called for funding bodies and universities to reverse this trend. Professor Maloney, who made the decision to cut the Departments, was quoted in the recent House of Lords report Innovation in EU Agriculture as supporting, "A need to boost soil science, which had been neglected in recent decades."

Pete Riley, who featured in The Independent's list of top 100 environmentalists, formerly of Friends of the Earth and now chair of GM Freeze, said, "Rothamsted appears to be swimming against a tide of scientific opinion across the world, which is saying we need to improve our knowledge of the sciences vital to ensuring agricultural ecosystems function to their highest potential and are restored to a condition that will enable future generations to maintain food production. It is a sad day when important areas of research, on which Rothamsted has led for so many years, are axed just when we need them most."