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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Sun, 25 May 2014 17:55:56 +0200
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This is Mario Pareja, from Uruguay, attempting to share with all of you our experiences in evaluating 20 years of investment in agricultural research & development & innovation (R&D&I) by the National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIA) in Uruguay (INIA-UY). In this message, I would like to provide you with a general framework for the evaluation, the team we formed and other issues related to the juridical-legal and institutional contexts, as well as some of the conclusions. Not all these may be applicable to the CGIAR centres but we believe thay could be of use to the national agricultural research systems (NARS) in reform or to be created. 

Late in 2009, INIA-UY celebrated its 20 years of existence. INIA-UY was born as the national institute for agricultural R&D&I in Uruguay in 1989, substituting the previous chain of independent research stations that existed in the country, all attached to, and coordinated by, the Ministry of Agriculture. The bid for an open call for proposals was regarded as a welcomed act of openess and transparency of INIA-UY. They called for an external and independent multidimensional (economic, social and environmental) evaluation of its investments during 20 years. The Interamerican Institute for Agricultural Cooperation (IICA) responded to the bid preparing a proposal that finally won the bid. A local team was formed with J. Bervejillo, as economist; M. Bianco, as sociologist; two environmental specialists, A. Torres and A. Ruiz; and myself, as coordinator of the team and institutional specialist. An international advisory board to the local team included D. Byerlee, consultant and specialist on agricultural R&D&I impact assessment; J. Alston, Professor of University of California Davis and specialist on impact assesment of agricultural R&D&I; E. Alarcon, IICA, specialist on institutional assesments; M. Otero, IICA representative in Uruguay; and A, Lapido, dairy producer in Uruguay. All of my messages are on behalf of and credit to all the team members, although the opinions are mine.

It is important to stress the factors that played a role in INIA-UY's creation and shaped  its legal-juridical framework, as well as the institutional set-up, because they are key elements in explaining many of the INIA-UY's successes.

First, by the late 1980's, the agricultural sector of Uruguay, basis for the country´s economy, and for decades its producer of export products (beef, wool, dairy and agricultural products: rice, wheat, barley, maize, soybeans, etc.) was rapidly losing its competitiveness at the international level and showed very low productivity indicators. This fact was well known by farmers and growers and an issue of concern for most of them. Their organzations, specially one of them (the Federation), reached a point that, at one of their meetings, and responding to a complete inertia from the state regarding funding to agricultural research, pledged their own funding for agricultural R&D&I as the only way to recoup competitiviness and increase productivity. They actually proposed to be taxed in order to fund, themselves, agricultural research!

Second, the very small group of researchers that had remained (a large majority of them had left the country or moved to the private sector) at the agricultural research stations were lobbying for more funding for research and for reshaping the structure of agricultural R&D&I system. They organized themselves, built upon a previous successful state-private sector joint venture, that of rice, and were extremely active contacting farmers, farmers's organizations and politicians as well as influencial decission makers. Their objective was to seek additional funding for salaries (to retain qualified researchers), research expenses (to actually be able to do research), human capital development (send people to training activities and post-graduate education) as well as develop social capital (networking with other institutions of the country, including private sector, as well as from abroad).

Third, the political stage was set up for changes. The dictatorship, that had kept the country in darkness and agricultural research without funding for more than 11 years, had fallen and a new breed of enthusiastic politicians took over. Democracy allowed that, soon, a proposal for a law to create INIA was on the table and it took a whole year of discussion in the parliament for its approval. It was, as a legislator interviewed by us put it, "one of the most discussed laws in history"!

The result was something that we, as evaluators of INIA-UY, stress as one of their main accomplishment: (1) LEGAL FRAMEWORK: INIA is a public organization (managing and generating public goods) but under the private juridical framework (not a state organization); (2) BUDGET FOR R&D&I: INIA was assured a budget as a % of the agricultural GDP co-financed by producers (tax levy) and the government matches these funds; (3) CO-MANAGEMENT: the government and producers sit and shared decisions at the general board of directors but also at the regional advisory boards attached to the research stations; (4) MANDATE: INIA was mandated a clearly defined agricultural R&D&I responsability; not an extension one. INIA's only responsability in this theme is to coordinate extension and diffusion of innnovations with other institutions of the country and a mechanism was provided in the law for INIA-UY to do so.

Well. This is like begining the story by the end, by the conclusions. We believe that this view is essential in order to capture some of the issues - the scenarios - that make R&D&I a success or a failure. It's not enough to look at the field, measure some indicators about a technology, come back to our desks and then conclude yes or not. We need to understand more about the processes that have shaped and established the R&D&I systems in our countries: how they came about and how are they now working. 

With pleasure, and if times permits, I will comment later, in future emails, on the methodologies we used for each one of the dimensions: economic, social, environmental and institutional.

Mario R. Pareja
Ingeniero Agrónomo, M.S., Ph.D.
independent consultant 
Paraje El Colorado, Canelones,
Uruguay 
Telephone: 598-2-3654394 or 598-98372634
e-mail: parejamr (at) gmail.com

 [To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information, see http://www.fao.org/nr/research-extension-systems/res-home/news/detail/en/c/217706/ ].
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