The Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) and Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) have announced a joint strategic alliance.

The new partnership will see both organisations working together to take advantage of advances in technology, new scientific ideas and to develop partnerships with stakeholders from the public and private sectors. There will be pooling of expertise, facilities and knowledge across both QUB and AFBI.

It is understood that the new alliance is not a forerunner to a merger between both organisations, and they will remain independent of each other. The new model is based on the situation at the renowned Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands. It markets itself as a single body, but is actually a collaboration between two separate legal entities – the university and the old agricultural research institute of the Ministry of Agriculture. In NI, while QUB tends to do a lot of pre-market scientific work, the research at AFBI tends to be more production-related, and close to an end user, such as a farmer.

Speaking at a launch event at Balmoral Show last week, Dr Sinclair Mayne, the outgoing chief executive at AFBI, said the alliance would help the industry to cope better with the changes coming in the next decade. Those changes include increased food demand, climate change and pressure on land use, to be set alongside volatility and uncertainty for farmers in agricultural production and food systems.

Research requires money and the alliance, together with commercial partners, will help AFBI to get a better share of the funding made available by the UK Government. According to Mayne, there is scope to get up to six times more than they currently obtain; £12m compared with £1.9m at present.

At the launch, the new alliance received support from Ivor Ferguson, president of the UFU, Owen Brennan, the executive chair of Devenish Nutrition and John Henning, chair of AgriSearch.