Agroscope cuts: a budget decision with systemic consequences for food and nutrition research

The recent announcement by Agroscope to reduce its research scope and eliminate 58 full-time positions is a clear signal of how current public budget priorities are reshaping Switzerland’s innovation landscape in agriculture, food and nutrition. We view this as a major setback for the Swiss food and nutrition research landscape.

While the financial pressure behind these decisions is understandable, the implications deserve critical discussion.

The strategic narrowing of research towards “core tasks” – primary production, environmental impacts, and policy support – comes at the explicit expense of areas such as:

🟢healthy diets 

🟢innovative and novel food systems 

🟢niche and resilient crops 

🟢innovative approaches. 

These are the domains where future resilience, sustainability, and public health intersect.

At a time when Switzerland is facing complex challenges such as climate adaptation, rising healthcare costs linked to nutrition, biodiversity loss, and structural transformation in agriculture, reducing investment in these forward-looking areas risks creating blind spots. 

This raises a few fundamental questions: 

🔵What counts as a “core task” in a transformation era? 

🔵Can we afford to separate agricultural production from nutrition and health outcomes? 

🔵Who will take responsibility for innovation and nutrition research when public institutions step back? 

🔵How can we favor prevention over therapy by targeting risk factors for non-communicable diseases such as unhealthy diets and offer financial incentives in this area? 

The risk is not only the loss of research capacity, but the weakening of interdisciplinary thinking, essential for addressing today’s interconnected problems. 

Agroscope’s achievements in food and nutrition research include fermented foods and health, sustainable and healthy diets, plant-based foods and alternatives, food safety and food quality. 

From a Swiss Research Network – Healthy Nutrition (SRN–HN) perspective, we see a growing need to: 

⚪strengthen cross-sector collaboration beyond institutional boundaries

⚪develop participatory and practice-based innovation models

⚪integrate experiential, community, and user knowledge alongside formal research.

 If institutional research space is shrinking, we must ensure that innovation capacity does not shrink with it, but instead reorganizes and expands. 

 The transition we are witnessing is not just about budgets, but also about redefining how knowledge is produced, shared, and applied in society.

 Now is the time to ask:

🔴 How do we collectively safeguard research and innovation in areas that are essential but no longer institutionally prioritized?

 As Swiss Research Network – Healthy Nutrition, we will continue to strengthen nutrition research in Switzerland.

We invite actors across research, policy, and practice to engage in this conversation.