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This chapter examines the creation of incentives for private sector involvement as a new approach to funding agricultural research and development for the tropics. It explains that this approach is an advanced purchase commitment that rewards innovative agricultural advances based on their adoption in the tropics. Purchase commitments such as this, which pay for research outputs, are appropriate for encouraging the development of specific, needed products and they can also potentially provide incentives throughout the product supply chain.

This chapter summarizes the book's main conclusions and cautions against exclusive reliance on any single approach. The book's central thesis is that nature's wisdom is found primarily in competitively tested individual adaptations, in wild species and sometimes still in cultivated ones, rather than in the overall structure of natural ecosystems. It notes how some biotechnology advocates underestimate the perfection of existing individual adaptations and suggests that most near-term opportunities for genetic improvement of crops or livestock will involve tradeoffs that had constrained natural selection in the past. The chapter considers two basic approaches to the problem of varying environments: phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging. It also discusses bet-hedging in food production, the bet-hedging benefits of organic farming and animal agriculture, and the use of diversity for bet-hedging in agricultural research. Finally, it describes traditional agricultural sciences that have been more receptive to input from evolutionary biology than biotechnology has.

This chapter looks at the farm demonstration trains that toured California. It shows that these agricultural demonstration trains were the result of a long period of interaction between the University of California-College of Agriculture and the Southern Pacific Company. The chapter studies the influence of the Southern Pacific on agricultural research, before moving on to the alliance formed between the Southern Pacific and the University of California's College of Agriculture. Both of them were unpopular and constantly attacked by critics. The chapter further expounds on farm demonstration trains and studies the promotion of scientific agriculture across the western regions.

Several food price spikes since 2007 have motivated researchers and policymakers to weigh the factors behind high food prices, their implications for long-term food security, and the connection between food prices and civil conflict. We examine global food system dynamics to 2025 through scenarios of alternative futures for food supply and demand using the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) global food model. We analyze scenarios with increased investment in agricultural research and/or reduced post-harvest losses. The results indicated that increased investments can significantly reduce projected food prices relative to the baseline, with resulting improved food consumption and reductions in the number of malnourished children. Large reductions in post-harvest food losses also contribute to lower food prices, higher food availability, and improved food security, although the impacts are not as positive as for increased agricultural research.

Research and development investments to improve wellbeing of smallholder farmers must contend with the heterogeneity and resource limitations of smallholder systems as well as the conflicting objectives of agricultural research and the lack of effective institutional articulation in the R&D process. This chapter traces the evolution of the three stages of the current research and development paradigm, namely technology design, adaptive research, and dissemination and scaling out and the institutional constraints that have accompanied these developments from a national and international perspective. The chapter argues that one critical constraint is the lack of investment in institutional capacity to undertake adaptive research, and thus enhance R&Ds’ understanding of technology response and farmer adoption. During a period when parts of the R&D system are undergoing structural reform, particularly extension and within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), what should not be lost is more effective integration across the R&D system

In 1948 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station jointly agreed to the creation of a novel research institution on the grounds of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory: an agricultural experiment station where researchers would consider the effects of radiation and fallout on agricultural production and the application of radioisotopes in agricultural research. This University of Tennessee–Atomic Energy Commission Agricultural Research Laboratory and the plant-breeding program established within it in the mid 1950s are the central subjects of this chapter. If looking at the cooperative mutation breeding program at Brookhaven suggests how some areas of agricultural research became embedded in the national system for nuclear research and development, taking a look at UT-AEC Agricultural Research Laboratory reveals how nuclear technologies became embedded in the established U.S. agricultural research system. A key protagonist in this chapter is Thomas Osborne, who was hired in 1954 to head up research into induced mutation, including their use in breeding important Tennessee crops, and who oversaw both an expansion in the radiation facilities of the laboratory and the creation of a cooperative research program along the lines of the program established earlier at Brookhaven.

There are three key issues that must be addressed when it comes to public investment in agricultural research and development: whether public funding is sustained over time, whether the funding is sufficient to meet emerging challenges, and whether the allocation conforms to development priorities. This chapter analyses the extent of investment, institutional structure, and orientation of research programmes in the context of minimizing the vulnerability of agriculture in India. It examines the trends in public investment in agricultural R&D and its regional allocation. As a case study of improved technology, the chapter discusses developments in the seed industry and their implications for unfavourable production environments. It concludes by assessing the policy implications for making R&D sensitive to the vulnerability concerns.

Founded in 1982, and initially given a ten-year lifespan, Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research (ACIAR) sought to prove its worth through increases in agricultural productivity resulting from collaboration between state-level government scientists and local partners abroad. After renewal, ACIAR’s second decade saw a new focus on poverty reduction and the real-life adoption of new technologies and techniques. ACIAR’s third decade saw whole-of-government strategies toward Australia’s engagement within developing countries, particularly in response to the “war on terror” and the global food crisis. Public research needed to justify itself within national priorities and program-level outcomes, such as contributing to Australia’s economy and security, rather than simply pursuing individual projects based on their own merit.

This chapter broadens out the focus from Irish sociology to examine Irish scientific research. Its central theme is the way in which resources provided or jointly controlled by US actors underpinned the development of a modern scientific research infrastructure within the state in the period after the Second World War. The scientific fields principally affected by these financial injections were applied research related to agriculture, industry and economics. Money flowed into these fields from two major sources: the Grant Counterpart Fund, which was a legacy of Ireland’s participation in the Marshall Plan, and private US foundations. In other fields, such as management and `human sciences’, significant resource transfers took place in kind as much as in cash through productivity and technical assistance programmes. The infrastructure developments that clustered in the late 1950s and the early 1960s interacted with older scientific institutional configurations laid down under the Union with Britain and subjected to emaciating neglect after the advent of political independence.

The chapter examines what initially appear to be two contradictory policy developments in recent years. The first development is an increasing tendency to promote ‘hyper-ownership’ of genetic resources through intellectual property rights, restrictive contracts, and access and benefit-sharing laws. The second development, has been the negotiation of international laws and plans to support the conservation, collective pooling and sharing of plant genetic resources for agricultural research and plant breeding. While initially hard to reconcile, the chapter argues that these developments are actually closely related. By analyzing developments in international policy circles over the last fifty years, the paper demonstrates how countries and legal individuals have only been willing to agree to rules for pooling (some of) their resources after their ‘deeper’ rights of exclusive control over these resources had been conclusively established. In this way, the ‘poolers’ are embracing and using the same tools that are being promoted by the ‘controllers,’ but for different, broader, public goods-related purposes.

This chapter explores the key drivers of change in water productivity (WP) that would matter for India and that Indian agricultural research should embark on. It shows that WP enhancement would be an outcome of water allocation in most situations and crop WP improvement through various other means will not encourage farmers to allocate water to alternative uses and save water. It describes new ways of improving agricultural WP in developing countries and suggests that institutional interventions are a prerequisite for achieving actual water demand regulation.

We saw in Chapter Four that the UK can be proud of the quality of the research conducted in its universities. But we need to be clear what this success is. Success means relentless pressure on academics to produce papers that are going to be assessed by fellow academics as of the highest quality and frequently cited. For most academics today that means getting published in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals which is what matters for promotion, even though the assessment of their research excellence in the REF is supposed to be independent of the status of the journal in which their work appears. That drives competition in research performance whose logic is as obvious as rewarding a football team for scoring goals. The sure way for a university to move up the rankings and boost its prestige is to promote or hire hot-shot academics with strong publishing records. In science as in football we run the most open and most competitive league in the world—and hope to continue to do so even outside the EU. It has projected our universities high up the rankings, alongside the US. (There is one important difference from football—under the rules of the REF, academics could take their publications with them when they moved. It as if when you buy a star striker you get the goals he scored in the previous season as well. The logic is that it is part of their personal research performance that is being assessed. It has driven up the pay of the academic stars but also provided opportunities to younger post-docs after they get something published. Nicholas Stern’s review of the REF in 2016 proposed that such portability should end.) The high rankings of our research-intensive universities are a real achievement. But that is not the same as having the best national R&D system or contributing to tackling big global challenges or successfully commercializing new technologies or making a region a lively innovation cluster. We might hope that our research strengths contribute to these wider goals. But we may have been forced to make trade-offs to achieve research excellence which can actually make it harder to achieve other objectives.