Philip G. Pardey
Nienke M. Beintema

Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators Initiative
International Food Policy Research Institute
Washington, D.C.
October 26, 2001

This report was prepared under the auspices of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR’s) Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) initiative. An earlier version was prepared as a background paper to the Human Development Report 2001, Channeling Technology for Human Development, with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Significant additional funding was provided by the CGIAR Finance Committee, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), the Ford Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Swedish International Development Agency.

The authors are grateful to Patricia Zambrano and Connie Chan-Kang for their excellent research assistance, as well as Kathleen Sheridan, Joanna Berkman, and Mary-Jane Banks for their editorial input, and thank Julian Alston, Howard Elliott, Curt Farrar, Peter Hazell, Han Roseboom, Ford Runge, Jim Ryan, Ben Senauer, and Brian Wright for their useful comments on prior drafts.

Standing on the brink of a biotechnology revolution in agriculture, it is timely to take stock of the investments and institutional trends regarding agricultural R&D worldwide. In this report we assemble and assess new and updated evidence regarding investments in agricultural R&D by public and private agencies, contrasting developments in rich and poor countries. The payoffs to investments in agricultural research are considerable, and appear to remain so, but there are new policy concerns about the roles of the public and private sectors in funding and carrying out the research, especially in light of the revolutionary changes in the underlying sciences and the incentives facing research (as intellectual property regimes become stronger and international trade in science and technologies grows).

This report tracks trends in agricultural R&D over the past several decades. We also put research policies in a much longer timeframe, highlighting the critical importance that the accumulated stock of scientific knowledge has on today’s productivity performance and its effect on innovation and economic growth in the future.

The miracle of the past four decades is that today’s farmers are feeding almost twice as many people far better from virtually the same cropland base. The world used about 1.4 billion hectares of land for crops in 1961 and only 1.5 billion hectares in 1998 to get twice the amount of grain and oilseeds. Producing today’s food supply with 1960 crop yields would probably require at least an additional 300 million hectares of land, an area equal to the entire land mass of Western Europe.

At the same time, food prices have declined to the lowest levels in history, to the benefit of consumers who are able to eat better while spending less and less of their budget on food. Although, unconscionably, hundreds of millions of people are still food-insecure, this is not related to lack of overall production but more to the location of production and the access to food by countries, households, and individuals living on the edge of subsistence.

The current favorable dynamic balance between overall food supply and demand was not inevitable; neither was it a triumph of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Nor should it be taken for granted that it will persist. It has been the result of successful interactions among farmers, input suppliers, and an overwhelmingly publicly supported research and extension system that furnished innovations and relevant knowledge for free. Little land remains for the expansion of agricultural production (and some of the land, water, and other natural resources needed for agriculture are being degraded and diverted to other uses in other sectors), so crop and livestock yields must continue to increase for the decades ahead. They must then be maintained--at these much higher levels--for the foreseeable future against environmental, biological, and other factors that undermine past gains in production. Continued strong performance in research and innovation is needed to maintain a favorable food balance if, in addition to the 6 billion people we already have, we are to feed 3 billion more over the next half century.

As the 20^th century dawned, whole new vistas in agricultural R&D were opening up. Public funding for research was on the rise, initially in the rich countries, then gradually spreading to colonial countries and eventually to other parts of the developing world. A century later, the agricultural sciences are again shifting gears, delving deeper into the genetics of life. But now the public purpose in agricultural R&D is less focused and more closely scrutinized compared to a century ago. Complacency has crept in, too: some question the need for continued public funding, thinking the world’s food problems are solved or constrained by things other than R&D or that the private sector will do the job. None of these views is correct. Moreover, the public policy choices made now have far-reaching ramifications, just as the same choices did a hundred years ago.

Despite the buzz about biotechnology, informatics, and a myriad other technologies, the lag between investing in innovation and reaping the rewards is still substantial--measured in decades, not years. This is especially true for biologically based sciences like agriculture. It is timely to take stock of the state of agricultural R&D and to get a global perspective, not least because of increasing international interdependence regarding agricultural R&D. In this report, we provide new estimates of investments in agricultural research worldwide, updating our views of public roles and contrasting them with private efforts.

To the public, science seems to progress through a series of breakthroughs. The occasional genius does make a great leap forward, but the magic of science stems from the patient and persistent accretion of new knowledge. Today’s scientists stand firmly on the shoulders of those who went before them. While investments in research give rise to new ideas, know-how, and innovations in the near term, these innovations draw directly on the efforts of past research. It is the accumulation of research results over the long haul that accounts for the differences in agricultural productivity observed around the world. We developed money measures to quantify the stocks of knowledge that resulted from agricultural R&D spending in the United States and Africa to illustrate this growth and to encourage policy-makers to think in the long term

In the broad sweep of agricultural history, organized scientific research is a recent phenomenon, although farmers have tinkered with different techniques for over 10,000 years, and kings and emperors have collected plants on an ad hoc basis for millennia. In the late 18^th century, Thomas Jefferson, risking penalty of death, smuggled rice seeds out of Italy in the lining of his coat to encourage cultivation of the crop in South Carolina.¹ Science-based solutions to agricultural problems did not take root until the formation of agricultural societies throughout the United Kingdom and Europe in the early to mid-1700s. By the mid-1800s, the evolution of these societies gave rise to agricultural "experiment stations," beginning in Germany and England and spreading to the rest of Europe and, eventually, to the New World. Colonization spread them to the developing world. Japan, a much less-developed country than America or Europe for the 19^th and most of the 20^th century, measured by per capita income,² paralleled developments in the West by publicly funding and conducting agricultural research beginning in the mid-1800s.

Scientific agriculture developed hand in hand with these research institutions. Darwin’s theory of evolution, the pure-line theory of Johannson, the mutation theory of de Vries, and the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance all contributed to the rise of plant breeding in the beginning of the 20^th century. Pasteur’s germ theory of disease and the development of vaccines opened up lines of research in the veterinary sciences. The effectiveness of this body of science in raising yields and solving farmers’ production problems became evident in the first half of the 20^th century.

Progress in the science of genetics sped up around the middle of the 20^th century after Hersey and Chase, Watson and Crick, and others uncovered the role and structure of DNA. These findings engendered a huge research effort, largely publicly funded, that was directed mainly at the application of modern recombinant DNA methods to human health. Progress in this area also led to the development of genetic markers and transformation techniques useful to agriculture.The result was a wave of biological innovations, which, combined with changes in controls on intellectual property rights, attracted private investment.

Taken together, these developments are fundamentally changing the nature of the agricultural sciences, public and private roles, and the balance between locally provided and internationally traded R&D goods and services. And they will continue to affect all these aspects as we move into the 21^st century.

Worldwide, public investments in agricultural research nearly doubled, in inflation-adjusted terms, from an estimated $11.8 billion (1993 international dollars)³ in 1976 to nearly $21.7 billion in 1995 (Table 1).⁴ Yet for many parts of the world, growth in spending during the 1990s slowed dramatically. In the rich countries, public investment grew just 0.2 percent annually between 1991 and 1996, compared with 2.2 percent per year during the 1980s. In Africa, there was no growth at all--the continuation of a longer-run trend, with more rapid growth in spending in the 1960s (a post-independence period of institution building for many African countries, underwritten with funds from the North)⁵ gradually giving way to debt crises in the 1980s and curbs on government spending and waning donor support through the 1990s. In Asia, the 1990s figure was 4.4 percent, compared with 7.5 percent the previous decade. Growth slowed in the Middle East and North Africa as well.

China is an exception. Growth in spending during the first half of the 1990s rebounded from a period of lower growth during the last half of the 1980s.⁶ Things look a little better in Latin America, too, with growth in spending of 2.9 percent per year from 1991 to 1996, following little or no growth during the dismal decade of the 1980s. But the recovery seems fragile and is not shared widely throughout the region.⁷ Public research in countries like Brazil and Colombia, which did better in the early 1990s, suffered cutbacks in the later part of the decade, and many of the poorer (and smaller) countries have failed to experience any sustained growth in funding for the past several decades.

The distribution of spending on agricultural research has shifted as well. In the 1990s, for the first time, developing countries as a group spent more than the developed countries on public agricultural research (Figure 1). Among the rich countries, $10.2 billion in public spending was concentrated in just a handful of countries. In 1995, the United States, Japan, France, and Germany accounted for two-thirds of this public research, about the same as two decades before. Just three developing countries--China, India, and Brazil--spent 44 percent of the developing world’s public agricultural research money in 1995, up from 35 percent in the mid-1970s.

These regional totals mask even more variation among countries. For example, more than 40 percent of 19 African countries spent less than $20 million on agricultural R&D in 1991.⁸ Only two countries (Kenya and South Africa) spent more than $100 million. Among 15 Latin American countries, four spent less than $10 million in 1995, while the two largest countries, Brazil and Mexico, spent about $900 million and $300 million, respectively.

Geography is one way to group countries; another way is to group them according to per capita income. Figure 2 gives a breakdown of agricultural R&D spending for high-, middle-, and low-income countries. The research shares for high-income countries are equivalent to those noted for developed countries in Figure 1. Spending by

low-income countries grew fastest, so their combined share of the global total increased from 19 percent in 1976 to 28 percent in the mid-1990s. However, this trend is deceiving, reflecting the comparatively rapid growth of India and China, two large countries whose developments dominate the group average. In fact, the low-income countries as a group, excluding China and India, lost some ground. Their share of global agricultural R&D spending dropped from 8.7 percent in 1976 to 8.3 percent in 1996.

The figures above refer to national investments, but agricultural innovation need not be home grown. A striking feature of the history of agricultural development is that technology can be bought, borrowed, or as Jefferson showed, stolen. The result is that it moves across borders, both by design and by accident. Nonetheless, most agricultural technologiesare sensitive to local climate, soil, and other biophysical attributes, making them less easily transferable. Soybeans are day-length sensitive, so different varieties must be developed for different latitudes. Likewise, many tropical soils are naturally acidic, a less prevalent problem in temperate areas, and consequently, crops that thrive in temperate soils can fail or falter under tropical conditions.⁹

Unlike medical and mechanical innovations that are applicable from Tijuana to Tokyo, it is usually necessary to adapt agricultural technologies to local conditions. This has implications for the diffusion of agricultural research results and for the biases that are introduced when research is concentrated in relatively few places. The more similar countries are in terms of their agroecological attributes, the more likely it is that research done in one country will be applicable, with comparatively little adaptation, in the other country. For these reasons, it can be useful to group countries according to their agroecology. One option is to divide them into tropical countries (which have year-round adjusted temperatures greater than 18 degrees Celsius on average¹⁰) and nontropical countries. In 1997, about 1.44 billion hectares (62 percent of the world’s agricultural land) and 2.6 billion people (45 percent of the world’s population) were in tropical countries.¹¹ By value, this greatly exceeds the tropical-country share of public research spending (about 28 percent) but almost exactly matches the share of agricultural output that comes from the tropics, almost all of it from the developing countries (Figure 3).

About 65 percent of the nontropical world’s agricultural research occurs in developed countries. Developing countries such as Argentina, China, and South Korea, with broadly similar growing conditions, will find this research relatively easy to adapt. However, transferring technologies from nontropical regions to tropical countries like Brazil, India, and many parts of Africa often requires research fitted to local realities.

In developed countries, about 43 percent of the public research was done by universities in the mid-1990s, compared with 25 percent in Latin America and only 10 percent in Africa (in 1991) (Figure 4). The eleven Latin American countries in our sample have moved more in the direction of the developed countries, with universities playing an ever greater role.

Most of the public research in Africa is done by government agencies; at least that was the situation in 1991 (and for many years before that). However, in Africa as well as Latin America, nonprofit institutions perform more of the public research than they do in developed countries. Many of these nonprofits are linked to producer organizations, conducting research on beverage crops like tea and coffee or fiber crops like cotton, and are funded largely from taxes levied on production or exports or by voluntary contributions made by producers. In 1996, Colombia had 12 nonprofits conducting about one-quarter of the country’s agricultural R&D. Many of these Colombian agencies initiated research several decades ago, while in Central American countries like Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras, nonprofit research is a much more recent phenomenon. In the mid-1970s, nonprofits spent only 5 percent of the agricultural R&D dollars in these Central American countries; two decades later, they represented 45 percent of total R&D spending.¹²

To overcome the biases against the development and diffusion of agricultural technologies among developing countries, agricultural research that was internationally conceived and funded began in the mid-1940s. It expanded through the 1950s as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations placed agricultural staff in less-developed countries to work alongside scientists in national research organizations on joint-venture research. These efforts became the model for subsequent programs in international agricultural research, as they evolved into the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines in 1960 and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico in 1967. Hoping to show that the model of international agricultural research could achieve success in broad agroecological regions as well as specific commodities, other international centers were established in Nigeria (the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, IITA) in 1967 and Colombia (the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, CIAT) in 1968.

The further development of international agricultural research centers took place largely under the auspices of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR, or CG for short), established in 1971 as bilateral and multilateral donors bought into the model.¹³ The CG system began modestly. Between 1960 and 1964, of the institutes that would become the CG, only IRRI was operating as such. By 1970, the budgets of the four founding centers totaled US$15 million. During the next decade, the progressive expansion of the total number of centers, and the funding per center, involved a tenfold increase in nominal funding, to US$141 million in 1980. During the 1980s, funding continued to grow, more than doubling in nominal terms, to reach US$305 million in 1990, and although the rate of growth had slowed, it was still impressive. In the 1990s, two decades of growth came to an abrupt end. The number of centers continued to grow--from 13 to 18 at one point, but now 16--but funding did not grow enough in inflation-adjusted terms to maintain the real funding per center, let alone the rate of growth. In 2000, the CG spent US$305 million (in 1993 prices, or US$338 million in nominal terms), less than the US$334 million (1993 prices) it spent in 1990 (Figure 5). If funding for the CG had kept pace with the growth in agricultural R&D investment in rich countries, the system would have spent US$377 million (in nominal terms) in 2000. If its growth had matched that of agricultural R&D spending in the less-developed countries, this would have been US$526 million.

Although the CG markedly accelerated the spread of new varieties of wheat, rice, and other technologies (commonly called the Green Revolution), it spent only a small, and of late, declining, fraction of the global agricultural research investment. In 1995, it represented just 1.5 percent of the nearly $22 billion spent on public-sector agricultural research by national agencies--or 2.8 percent of the research spending of the less-developed countries, down from its 3.8 percent share in 1985.¹⁴

The efforts of individual innovators and companies in agriculture have always played a key role. In the United States, entrepreneurs such as John Deere, Cyrus McCormick, and the Wallace family (founders of Wallace Seed Corn, later Pioneer) are part of agriculture’s long affair with capitalism. Most herbicides, insecticides, and veterinary medicines were developed in the private sector¹⁵ (although they drew on discoveries made by public research), as well as many food-storage, -transport, and -processing technologies, including the refrigerated railroad car and the grain elevator, to name but two. Private investment in chemical, mechanical, and food-processing research is now substantial and rose rapidly in the latter part of the 20^th century, at least until very recently.

Attention is presently riveted on biotechnology research. In 1994 the commercially unsuccessful Flavr-Savr™ tomato (genetically engineered to retain its "fresh-picked" flavor)¹⁶ heralded the beginning of a series of innovations derived from genetic engineering. In the mid-to late 1990s, commercially successful herbicide- and insect-tolerant crop varieties such as Roundup Ready® or Liberty Link® corn, cotton, and canola, or Bt corn and cotton followed.

In stark contrast to private research done in many other sectors (like electronics, engineering, information, and most of medicine), the agricultural research carried out by private biotechnology and life sciences firms is controversial.¹⁷ However, little if anything is known about the total private spending on agricultural research worldwide, the overall mix of research in terms of its commodity and technology focus, or aspects of its industrial organization such as the size of the firms, their local or multinational character, and the location of the research (especially in terms of developed versus developing countries). In addition to biotechnology research, large amounts are also spent on agrochemical research and machinery related to agriculture, as well as very sizable investments in food-processing research by private firms. Our estimates on private R&D spending span this broader range of activities, highlighting private spending totals and the location of the research.

By the mid-1990s, about one-third of the $33 billion total investment in agricultural research worldwide was private (Table 2). But little of this research takes place in developing countries. The overwhelming majority ($10.8 billion, or 94 percent of the global total) is conducted in developed countries.¹⁸ In the less-developed countries (LDCs), the private share of research is just 5.5 percent,

and public funds are still the major source of support (and remain a significant source of support in rich countries, too, accounting for about half their total funding).

Innovation systems are bound to involve duplication and competition between the public and private sectors, some of which helps spur science. But with some exceptions, private and public labs largely do different types of research, even in rich countries. In the early 1990s, around 12 percent of private research dealt with farm-focused technologies, whereas over 80 percent of public research had that orientation.¹⁹ Food and other postharvest research accounted for 30 to 90 percent of private agricultural R&D in rich countries, and in countries like Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, it was the dominant focus of private agricultural research. Chemical research was of comparatively minor importance in Australia and New Zealand, but it accounted for more than 40 percent of private research in the United Kingdom and the United States and nearly three-quarters of private agricultural research in Germany.

There is a concentration of research in private firms doing different types of research in different countries (see Box 5). In the early 1990s, Japan, the United States, and France account for 33 percent, 27 percent, and 8 percent, respectively, of all food-processing research carried out by the private sector in the countries that form the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Chemical research related to agriculture is even more concentrated geographically: the United States, Japan, and Germany respectively represent

41 percent, 20 percent, and 10 percent of all reported private-sector research along these lines.²⁰

The type of R&D done by private firms has changed over time. For example, in the United States, where time-series data are available, research on agricultural machinery dropped from 36 percent of the private-share total in 1960 to just 13 percent in 1966. Postharvest food-processing research contracted, too, from 44 percent to 29 percent. Two of the more significant growth areas were plant breeding and veterinary and pharmaceutical research. Research spending on agricultural chemicals grew as well, and now accounts for more than one-third of total private agricultural R&D.

For those concerned about the plight of poor people and poor countries, the present preoccupation with private roles in agricultural R&D is misguided. As profitable markets develop over the long run, the private sector will no doubt play a much bigger role, but it is folly to think that private research will substantively replace public science in Southern countries anytime soon. Agricultural R&D--like many other areas of research--still relies on significant amounts of public support and is likely to continue to do so for many years (perhaps always). This is especially true in the poorer parts of the world where the incentives for privately financed research are weak for reasons that will take considerable time to change. And even in rich countries, much private science involves chemical and food-processing concerns and crop and animal technologies more suited to capital-intensive forms of commercial agriculture with high, off-farm, value-added aspects. It is more than likely the scope of private biotechnology research will expand (pending public acceptance and regulatory approval), but much of the pretechnology research and certain types of biotechnologies for which it is hard to appropriate the benefits privately will continue to be a problem of public policy in rich and poor countries alike.

There are prospects for public funding of private research to tackle poor-country problems. Just as large amounts of public funds are used to underwrite privately performed health, defense, and other research with public-good elements in rich countries, so too can subsidies, cofinancing arrangements, joint ventures, contract research, or other institutional instruments be used to tap private research for the benefit of poor people. Private, not-for-profit research is one largely unexplored option. Private non-profits offer real promise for creatively bridging the public-private divide that stems from different research cultures and objectives as well as differing incentives and abilities to address the changing intellectual property regimes surrounding agricultural R&D.

This measure helps capture the complementary nature of research investments, much as measuring labor productivity as output per unit of labor carries with it returns to the use of complementary land, capital, and other purchased inputs.²¹ By analogy, research produces new know-how and new and improved techniques that act like additional inputs and raise productivity. Likewise, R&D can improve the quality of an existing output (such as enhancing the vitamin A content of rice), which can be seen as increasing the amount of a bundle of outputs (which includes both rice and vitamin A), thus raising productivity.

The left-hand panel of Table 3 presents a measure of agricultural research intensity (ARI), specifically, agricultural research expenditures as percentages of agricultural GDP. Figure 6 depicts the same information graphically.²² In 1995, as a group, developed countries spent $2.64 on public agricultural R&D for every $100 of agricultural output, a sizable increase over the $1.53 they spent per $100 of output two decades earlier. Since 1975, research intensities rose for the developing countries as a group, but unevenly. Despite gaining a greater absolute share of the developing world’s total agricultural research spending (see Figure 1), China’s agricultural research intensity in the mid-1990s was no greater than it was in the mid-1980s. In other words, China’s research spending grew, but its agricultural sector grew just as fast. Although public research throughout the rest of Asia and Latin America appears to have grown in intensity during the last decade of our data, Africa has lost considerable ground, with research intensities lower than in the 1970s.

The large and growing gap in research intensity between rich and poor countries continues to widen further in terms of total (private and public) spending (Figure 7). In 1995, total spending intensities were more than eight times higher in rich countries than they were in poor ones; they were four times higher when only public spending was used as the basis of the intensity calculation.²³

Richer countries invest public funds in agricultural R&D more intensively than do poorer ones, but many low-income countries invest more intensively in public agricultural research than per capita income alone would suggest. Public agricultural research intensities have a

tendency to decline as the importance of agriculture in the domestic economy (agricultural GDP as a share of total GDP) increases, with, seemingly, a looser link between agricultural research intensities and per capita income.²⁴ For example, some low-income countries with comparatively small agricultural sectors invest quite intensively in agricultural R&D: Botswana, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zambia all had intensity ratios between 2.2 percent and 3.7 percent in the early 1990s, comparable to those of Germany, Japan, and the United States.²⁵ The information shown in Figure 8 uses long-run data for the United States to dramatically reinforce the notion of an inverse relationship. The general pattern is clear, although there have been periodic reversals in the trends of the constituent series or the relationships between them.

Other research-intensity or spending ratios can be calculated; two of these are reported in Table 3. One measures agricultural R&D spending relative to the size of the economically active agricultural population; the other, relative to total population. In 1995, rich countries spent more than nearly $590 per agricultural worker, more than double the corresponding 1976 ratio. Poor countries spent just $8.50 per agricultural worker in 1995, less than double the 1976 figure. These rich-poor country differences are, perhaps, not too surprising. A much smaller share of the rich-country workforce is employed in agriculture, and the absolute number of agricultural workers declined more rapidly in rich countries than it did in the poor countries.

Agricultural research spending per capita rose, too, by an average of 25 percent for developed countries (from $9.60 per capita in 1975 to $12.00 in 1995) and 79 percent in developing countries (from $1.50 per capita in 1975 to $2.50 in 1995). Notably, per capita research spending (in terms of both total population and agricultural workers) declined in Africa, the only region of the world where this occurred.

These trends may actually understate the gap in scientific knowledge. Science is a cumulative endeavor, with a snowball effect. Innovations beget new ideas and further rounds of innovation or additions to the cumulative stock of knowledge. The mutually beneficial effects of accumulating and exchanging ideas is why lone innovators have largely given way to institutional approaches to research, why scientific disciplines formed professional organizations and spawned journals to capture and carry forward findings, and why scientists seek out other scientists at conferences, via the internet or other venues. And so the size of the accumulated stock of knowledge, not merely the amount of investment in current research and innovative activity, gives a more meaningful measure of a country’s technological capacity.

The current stock of knowledge and the contribution of past research spending to that stock is sensitive to the types of science being done, the institutional structures surrounding the science, and the economic context that affects the use of this stock. Some science spending makes persistent and even perpetual contributions to the changing stock of locally produced knowledge: the same spending in societies ravaged by wars, institutional instability, and outright collapse may have a much more ephemeral effect.

The sequential and cumulative nature of scientific progress and knowledge is starkly illustrated by crop improvement. It typically takes 7 to10 years of breeding to develop a uniform, stable, and superior variety of wheat, rice, or corn (with improved yield, grain quality, or other attributes). Today’s breeders build on an accumulation of knowledge built up by the breeders of yesterday. Breeding lines from earlier research are used to develop new varieties, so research of the distant past is still feeding today’s research. New crops not only carry forward the genes of earlier varieties, they also carry the crop-breeding and -selection strategies made by earlier breeders, whether they are the farmers who made the selections over the first 10,000 years or the scientific crosses and selections made by researchers during the past 100 years.

Figure 9 shows a partial pedigree of the wheat variety Pioneer 2375, released in February 1989 by Pioneer-Hybrid International, the private company mentioned in connection with the Wallace family (now part of Dupont). Pioneer 2375 was one of several commercially significant wheat varieties in Minnesota during the early 1990s.²⁶ This pedigree reveals the persistent effects of research spending in the distant past on current innovative activity. Pioneer 2375 was developed by crossing the varieties Olaf/Era/Suquamuxi68 and Chris/ND487/Lark. Moving back through successive generations reveals that varieties developed or discovered as long ago as 1873 (Turkey Red), 1901 (Federation), and 1935 (Norin 10) are part of this pedigree. Over 14 percent of the varieties or breeding lines incorporated into Pioneer 2375’s pedigree were available prior to 1900, and at least 36 percent before 1940.²⁷ The cumulative nature of this process means that past discoveries and related research are an integral part of contemporary agricultural innovations. Conversely, the loss of a variety (or the details of the breeding histories that brought it about) means the loss of accumulated past research from the present stock of knowledge.

Providing adequate funding for research is thus only part of the story. Putting in place the policies and practices to accumulate innovations and increase the stock of knowledge is an equally important and almost universally unappreciated foundation. Discoveries and data that are improperly documented or inaccessible (and effectively exist only in the mind of the researcher) are lost from the historical record when researchers retire from science. These "hidden" losses seem particularly prevalent in cash-strapped research agencies in the developing world, where inadequate and often irregular amounts of funding limit the functioning of libraries, data banks, and genebanks, and hasten staff turnover.

There can be catastrophic losses, too, tied to the political instability that is also a cause of hunger. Civil strife and wars cause an exodus of scientific staff, or at least a flight from practicing science. Most of Uganda’s scientific facilities, for example, were in ruins when its

civil war ended in the early 1980s. It is hard to imagine that today’s Congo once had among the most sophisticated scientific infrastructure in colonial Africa, comparable to the facilities and quality of staff found in most developed countries at the time.²⁸

To construct money metrics of the knowledge stocks for US agriculture, we developed an annual series of public agricultural R&D spending from 1862 (the first year of operation of the United States Department of Agriculture and federal funding for the land-grant universities) to 2000.²⁹ The private-sector R&D series stretches back to 1850. Private research (often an individual initiative in its earlier years) is a long-established feature of US agriculture, beginning well before governments got directly involved and, for most years, spending more than the public sector.³⁰

Agricultural research in Africa started in Britain’s Central and Eastern African colonies at the turn of the 20^th century, with renewed spurts of spending after World War II (when the Colonial Research Fund became operational in the early 1940s) and again in the 1960s as large injections of donor dollars underwrote the shift to independent, postcolonial governments. The French government began investing in agricultural research in its West African colonies after 1943 (a little later than the British), mainly when it created the Office de la Recherche Scientifique Coloniale.³¹ Our African agricultural research series runs from 1900 to 2000 (the figures for public research are based on direct estimates since 1960 and synthetic estimates for earlier years, with a synthetic series for private research since 1900).

We generated money measures of the stock of scientific knowledge based on research performed in the United States (assuming a baseline depreciation rate of 3 percent per annum) and Africa (assuming the same 3 percent baseline depreciation rate and also a depreciation rate of 6 percent per year, perhaps more realistic given the instability and lack of infrastructure for R&D throughout much of the region).³² Knowledge stocks in 1995--representing a discounted accumulation of research spending from 1850 for the United States and from 1900 for Africa--were expressed as percentages of 1995 AgGDP to normalize for differences in the size of the respective agricultural sectors (Figure 10). The accumulated stock of knowledge in the United States was about 11 times more than the amount of agricultural output produced in 1995. In other words, for every $100 of agricultural output, there existed a $1,100 stock of knowledge to draw upon. In Africa, the stock of scientific knowledge in 1995 was actually less than the value of African agricultural output that year. The ratio of the US knowledge stock relative to US agricultural output in 1995 was nearly 12 times higher than the corresponding amount for Africa. If a depreciation rate for Africa of 6 percent instead of 3 percent is used, the gap in American and African ratios is more than fourteenfold.

These measures suggest the immensity, if not the outright impossibility, of playing catch-up, and the consequent need to transmit knowledge across borders and continents. The measures also underscore the need to raise current levels of funding for agricultural R&D throughout the region while also developing the policy and infrastructure needed to accelerate the rate of knowledge accumulation in Africa over the long haul. Developing local capacity to carry forward findings will yield a double dividend: increasing local innovative capacities while also enhancing the ability of African science to tap discoveries made elsewhere. Not least, this calls for increasing investments in primary, secondary, and higher education, which is essential if the generation and accumulation of knowledge is to gain the momentum required, putting economies on a path to lift people out of poverty.³³

By the end of 2000, over 11,500 field trials for transgenic crop technologies had occurred in 39 countries. While the number of countries permitting field trials was evenly divided between developed and developing countries, the location of the trials was not. Much more of the technology testing takes place in rich counties, where over 80 percent of the trials occurred, with the United States accounting for more than half the world total. Less than 20 percent of the trials were conducted in the LDCs.

Likewise, the location of approved "events" is somewhat lopsided. An "event" involves the insertion of a specific gene in a particular crop, resulting in the expression of a desired trait in that crop. For example, insertion of the Bt cry1(c) protein producing gene into a particular cotton variety is considered an event. By the end of 2000, more than 180 crop events involving 15 basic phenotypic (physical) characteristics had been deregulated or approved for planting, feed, or food use in at least one of 27 countries and for at least one of 14 crops. Successfully modified traits important for the major agricultural crops include delayed ripening, herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, modified color or oil, male sterility/fertilizer restoration (used, for example, in breeding hybrid varieties of corn and other crops), and virus resistance. Most of the approvals have been issued in the United States and Canada, with few so far in developing countries.

These geographical imbalances carry through to the technology-use stage as well. Although transgenic crops were grown in eight LDCs by the end of 2000 (compared with only seven developed countries), almost three-quarters of the world’s transgenic acreage was located in rich counties. The United States alone accounted for two-thirds of the world’s transgenic crop acreage. Close to 60 percent of US transgenic crop acreage was sown to herbicide-resistant soybeans (mainly Roundup Ready®), followed by corn at 28 percent (mostly insect resistant), and cotton at 18 percent. Argentina came second with nearly 24 percent of the global transgenic crop total (virtually all Roundup Ready® soybeans), Canada was third with 7 percent (predominantly herbicide-tolerant canola), and China, fourth with 1.2 percent (all transgenic cotton).

The transgenic share of a particular crop in a particular country is quite variable. About 84 percent of the combined soybean, cotton, and maize acreage in Argentina is sown to transgenic varieties, although most of this acreage consists of herbicide-tolerant soybeans. In 2000 about 12 percent of the Chinese cotton crop is planted with insect-resistant strains. In the United States, 41 percent of the combined cotton, corn, and soybean acreage was transgenic. This increased to 49 percent in 2001, with a quarter of the corn acreage, and two-thirds of both the cotton and soybean acreage planted to transgenic varieties that year.³⁴ The absence of regulatory approvals for the commercial use of transgenic varieties (as distinct from trials) is a major reason why LDCs are lagging behind. Another is the lag in getting genetic traits into varieties appropriate for different regions, which also accounts for substantial regional differences in the rate of uptake within a country such as the United States. Finally, the lack of desirable traits in crops of significance to poor people is a serious constraint. Virus resistance in several noncommercial potato varieties is being tested in trials in Mexico, as is virus resistance in yams in Africa (with vitamin-A-enhanced rice and other quality-enhanced crops targeted to poor consumers still some way off), but as yet, none are ready for release to farmers. Moreover, the pipeline of biotechnologies suitable for LDCs has barely been primed, which is not at all surprising given the comparatively small sums of money invested to date. For example, in 1998, the CG centers collectively spent just $25 million on biotechnology research.³⁵ That same year, Monsanto invested $1.26 billion in R&D.

The protection of intellectual property can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, granting rights to intellectual property provides incentives to innovate and to reveal new knowledge that may otherwise be kept secret. On the other hand, the cumulative nature of agricultural research means that the proliferation of patents makes it increasingly difficult for public institutions and private start-ups to be active participants in biotechnology research. Moreover, the needs of industry and agricultural progress are yet to be properly reconciled with the rights of indigenous peoples and poor farmers who maintained many of the landraces on which today’s improved varieties depend.

In agricultural biotechnology, the most visible and controversial field of agricultural research, the portion of the key technology protected as intellectual property is now highly concentrated in the hands of a small number of large, multinational corporations based in North

America and Western Europe. Now, the very intellectual property rights that were associated with the surge of private research in biotechnology may block access to new developments by public-sector and nonprofit researchers.

As patenting becomes more prevalent, the number of separate rights needed to produce a new innovation proliferates. If ownership of these rights is diffuse and uncertain, the multilateral bargaining problem can become difficult to resolve. Instead of overexploitation of a common property with low entry costs, there is underexploitation of a pool of intellectual property due to the high costs of access--a manifestation of the so-called "tragedy of the anticommons," which occurs when too many individuals have rights of exclusion in a scarce resource. This is a problem that plagues not just agriculture but also research in the health sciences.³⁶

Many think the international proliferation of intellectual property rights and regimes currently impedes agricultural research that is conducted in, or of consequence to, developing countries. Answering this question requires an understanding of the jurisdictional extent of intellectual property, the geographic pattern of production, and the extent and nature of South-North trade flows. Rights to intellectual property are confined to the jurisdictions where they are granted. There is no such thing as an international patent. Gaining patent rights in the United States confers no intellectual property rights in China; a patent in China must also be sought and awarded to confer rights in that jurisdiction.

The extent of freedom to operate (the ability to practice or use an innovation) in less-developed countries is not well understood. For example, the recent innovation involving vitamin A in rice reportedly required permission for more than 70 patent rights. The well-publicized donations of their relevant technologies by major corporations left a strong impression that enforcement of large numbers of crucial patents was being relinquished in favor of the poor in developing countries. In fact, in some major rice-consuming countries, there are no valid relevant patents. There are very few, if any, in the countries where most poor, malnourished consumers reside.

Freedom to operate depends on specific circumstances. The intellectual property rights assigned to the key enabling technologies currently used to transform crops are mainly held in, and therefore primarily relevant to, rich-country jurisdictions.³⁷ Thus, for most of the staple crops that matter for food security in poor countries, the researcher’s freedom to operate in such nations is currently not the main issue. However, as poorer developing countries become compliant with their intellectual property commitments to the WTO, patent applications are increasingly lodged in developing countries, and the lines between nonprofit and commercial research become more blurred, there will most certainly be problems for research on some staple food crops. There are options to address the problems of access to technology, but they are yet to be fully developed and often require access to professionals who are well-versed in intellectual property and in woefully short supply in most LDCs.³⁸

The debate surrounding intellectual property rights and agricultural R&D must be placed in a longer-term framework. The role of the private sector in agricultural research is increasing, but private investment covers only a small subset of the needs and is mostly a complement, not a substitute, for continued public and other nonprofit research. For many developing countries, the performance of the latter is now hampered more by lack of funding than by issues related to intellectual property rights.

The social payoffs to investing in agricultural R&D have been high for rich and poor countries alike.³⁹ Although some think the easy gains have been made, with diminished returns to more recent research, there is no evidence in the extensive impact assessment literature to bear this out. The estimated returns to agricultural R&D are as high now as they ever were, high enough to justify an even greater investment of public funds.

Reinvigorating support for Southern science is unquestionably the top priority. But funding alone is not sufficient to close the South-North gap. Developing effective public-private partnerships--certainly much easier said than done, but by no means impossible--is another requirement; making efficient and effective use of the dollars invested in Southern science is yet another. Getting the political commitment to deal seriously with these problems is tough, and tougher still because of the long-term nature of the commitment required. Science, especially for agriculture, is not a stop-start affair: a sizable and sustained effort is needed, beginning now and continuing for decades to come if the prospects for growth and development that science has to offer the South are to materialize. Unquestionably, another century is too long to wait.

1 | Fowler (1994).

2 | Maddison (2001).

3 | Unless otherwise stated, all data on research expenditures are reported in 1993 prices and in international dollars (see Box 2).

4 | Wherever possible, we have used the internationally accepted statistical procedures and definitions developed by the OECD (1994) and UNESCO (1984) for compiling R&D statistics. We grouped our estimates into three major institutional categories: government agencies, agencies of higher education, and business enterprises. The latter category includes two subcategories of relevance for our study: private enterprises and nonprofit institutions. We have defined public agricultural research to include government agencies, agencies of higher education, and nonprofit institutions.

5 | Pardey, Roseboom, and Anderson (1991).

6 | Work underway by Fan, Qian, and Zhang (2001) points to continued growth in agricultural R&D spending in China during the latter part of the 1990s.

7 | Beintema and Pardey (2001).

8 | Pardey, Roseboom, and Beintema (1997).

9 | Of course, economic aspects, such as differences in relative factor prices (say the price of labor versus capital), mean that different locations are more or less suitable for different production methods, agricultural or not. For example, when labor is expensive relative to land or capital, farmers tend to demand and adopt technologies like larger tractors or chemical or genetic methods of weed control that save labor relative to the less expensive factors of production.

10 | More refined agroecologies using rainfall, soil type, and land slope and elevation, among other things, are often required to meaningfully assess the impact and spillover potential of agricultural technology, as described by Alston et al. (2000b) in the context of Latin America.

11 | Based on data summarized in Wood, Sebastian, and Scherr (2000).

12 | This change in shares represents the combined effect of a significant increase in spending by nonprofits and a contraction in spending by government agencies, especially since the mid-1980s.

13 | For more details on institutional developments related to the CGIAR, see Baum (1986), Gryseels and Anderson (1991), Anderson (1998), and Alston and Pardey (1999).

14 | The CGIAR is not the only organization doing agricultural R&D for developing countries. Two large, French agencies engaged in tropical agricultural research are the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), established in 1984 from a merger of various French institutes operating mainly in Africa, many since the 1940s, and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), formerly Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-mer, (ORSTOM). In 1998, these two agencies spent a total of $154 million (1993 international dollars) on agricultural R&D, about half the total expenditure of the CGIAR in that year. IRD does mainly basic research, with about 40 percent of its research directed toward agriculture and the rest related to environmental, health, and social issues. CIRAD focuses almost exclusively on internationally traded cash crops, such as cotton, oil palm, coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and has a more applied approach. Little of CIRAD’s and IRD’s spending involves direct financial support to developing-country organizations. Most of their resources are spent on the salaries of French research staff, the majority of whom are now based in France. More than one-half of each agency’s operating and capital budget is also spent in France. Thus, much of the French government support to agricultural R&D in LDCs via CIRAD and IRD now takes the form of in-kind rather than cash contributions.

15 | In this report, private research denotes research performed by private, for-profit enterprises.

16 | Although the tomatoes achieved the delayed-softening and taste-retention objectives of their developers, yields were poor, mechanical handling equipment turned most of them into mush before they got to market, and consumers weren’t willing to pay enough of a premium over conventional fresh tomatoes to cover costs. The biotechnology protests started with the Flavr-Savr™ when Jeremy Rifkin (author of The Biotech Century) managed to persuade Campbell’s Soup not to use biotech tomatoes in its products (Kasler and Lau 2000).

17 | Allegedly much of the opposition stems from concerns about the food safety and environmental consequences of the technologies. However, some of the concerns seem to relate to the private-for-profit nature of the research itself, including presumptions about the exercise of monopoly power. Jefferson (2001) discusses and elaborates on this idea.

18 | In contrast, in 1996 the private sector footed the bill for two-thirds of total science spending for 22 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Pardey, Roseboom, and Craig 1999).

19 | Pardey, Roseboom, and Craig (1999).

20 | These data exclude Switzerland, whose share of agricultural chemical R&D is likely to be substantial but unlikely to place it in the top three performers.

21 | For example, a farmer working just half a hectare of land is likely to produce more if she has a whole hectare to farm (the productivity of labor increases as the intensity of land use relative to labor increases). Similarly, the amount of rice harvested from a quarter of a hectare is likely to be higher if nitrogen fertilizer is applied than if it is not used (land productivity increases as the intensity of fertilizer use relative to land increases.)

22 | Agricultural GDP is a "value-added" measure of agricultural output that represents the gross value of output minus the value of purchased inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides, and machinery. Hence, these research-intensity ratios are higher than, and not directly comparable with, other research-intensity ratios that divide agricultural research spending by the gross value of output.

23 | We estimate a research intensity of 5.43 percent for rich countries in 1995 when using the total of public and private spending to form the measure, compared with 0.66 percent for poor countries.

24 | Pardey, Roseboom, and Craig (1992).

25 | In 1994-96, agricultural GDP was about 17 percent of total African GDP, and the region’s average per capita income was US$551 (in 1995 prices). If Africa followed the historical pattern of the United States, based on a consideration of per capita income alone, its public research intensity would be well less than 0.05 percent, the US figure for 1900 (estimating Africa’s per capita income in 2000 to be $1,375, less than the $3,182 per capita in the United States in 1900. Both figures are in 1993 international dollars.) Based on agricultural output shares, Africa’s research intensity would be in the range of 0.05-0.09 percent (the US figure for most of the first decade of the 20^th century when agriculture was about 22 percent of the gross domestic product). In fact, Africa’s research intensity was 0.85.

26 | Pioneer 2375 was the leading variety in Minnesota during the 1990s and was planted on nearly half the state’s wheat acreage by the middle of the decade.

27 | Another distinctive aspect of the pedigree is the pool of international expertise and germplasm that Pioneer 2375 represents. It includes material developed in Russia, Australia, Japan, Canada, and parts of the United States outside Minnesota. In fact, 7.5 percent of the 133 nodes in the pedigree that we could trace involved material from Africa, 9 percent from Europe, 11 percent from Latin America, and 27 percent from US states other than Minnesota.

28 | These same problems constrain not only the accumulation but the generation of knowledge. The effectiveness of science spending in developing new knowledge is also affected by the composition of funding (too many LDCs employ scientists with insufficient funds to plant or maintain field trials, properly stock laboratories, and so on). In addition, the downtime doing research is often higher in LDCs than in rich countries because of the poorer infrastructure for communications and transport, for example. Lower (and "lost" or late) salaries also lower the quality of scientific staff that can be hired or retained.

29 | The series includes spending on intramural USDA research, as well as research conducted by the US Forest Service and the state agricultural experiment stations located within the land-grant universities.

30 | At least according to the estimates developed by Huffman and Evenson (1993). Policies to promote private science date back at least to the US Constitution, ratified in 1788, which lays down the legal authority for the US patent system by giving Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

31 | Belgium, not the British or French, had the largest and most sustained commitment to agricultural research in Africa prior to 1960. These activities were centered in the Belgian Congo and formalized in 1933 when Belgium established the Institute National pour l’Étude Agronomique du Congo Belge, which eventually established a network of 36 research stations throughout the Congo. See Pardey, Roseboom, and Anderson (1991) for more details.

32 | The lag length relating innovations, I_t, to present and past research expenditures, R_t-s, was taken to be 10 years for both regions, so the stock of knowledge for year t, K_t, was formed as K_t = (1-d)K_t-1 + I_t, where d is the rate of knowledge depreciation and I_t = 10∑s =o R_t-s.

33 | See Beintema, Pardey, and Roseboom (1998) for a description of the woeful state of many agricultural universities throughout Africa.

34 | NASS (2001).

35 | Morris and Hoisington (2000).

36 | Heller and Eisenberg (1998).

37 | Binenbaum et al. (2000).

38 | Nottenburg, Pardey, and Wright (2001).

39 | Alston et al. (2000a).

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