I wouldn't be surprised if part of the condition of the grant was that any inventions should be commercialised, and some of the ownership of the invention transferred back to the funding body. If a charitable body like the Leverhulme Trust can recoup some of its investment, that enables it go on and fund even more research.

If the commercialisation involves extracting money from people who will gladly pay it to get better crop yields or lower fertiliser costs - like industrialised farmers in the first world - then it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

What would be a real shame is if the prices were set so that people in the third world could not use this advance to keep themselves and each other from falling into food poverty. However, food shortage is rarely about production capacity, and more often about allocation. Amartya Sen's work and all that.