ABSTRACT
The government spends money on farming and food research in two main ways. On the one hand, government departments buy research to help them meet their policy objectives for food and agriculture. Certain areas of farming and food research, such as plant breeding, have established traditions of stakeholder engagement. Equally, in policy on food and farming, some stakeholder interests have long been well represented. Formal processes of participation are designed to address this challenge. There are only a few examples of their use in UK farming and food research policy. The different methods of public participation are all designed to steer policy towards 'the public interest' or 'the public good'. However, they rest on different notions of this objective. The growth of patenting has not only contributed to a shift in the ratio of private to public agricultural research, but it has also changed the character of publicly funded research.
