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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Mon, 26 May 2014 18:02:46 +0200
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From Mark Reader, Research Assistant in Rural Business, at the University of Cambridge, UK. 27 years in agricultural research, development and economics.

As someone whose job is now to measure physical production and economic viability of farms in England, I would like to support the view of Dr Lele [Message 69] in drawing attention to a role for ongoing monitoring in the context of ex-post Impact Assessment.

Evaluating impacts of projects, ex-post, might miss some key factors in the agro-economic system (sector) and exclude key observations about possible failures in that system. Namely:

1). Is supply balancing demand (for example: what is production in 'kCalories per capita per day', or in 'grams of protein per capita per day')? These should be realistically assessed, rather than simply measured as 'food consumed per day'.

2). Are the production units (which are, in practice, almost invariably families) in the target region economically viable?

While these fundamentals, which require resources to measure, are out of balance or unknown project evaluations might not always give usable information.

The driving forces, to keep both of these in balance, I am pleased to say I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Deogratias Lwezaura [Message 62], are really the "mindset, attitudes, behavior" in society.

Mark Reader (Mr)
B.Sci(Agric) H1 honours
Rural Business Unit
Department of Land Economy
Cambridge CB3 9EP, 
UK
+44 1223 337 163
e-mail: mar58 (at) cam.ac.uk
www.landecon.cam.ac.uk/directory/mark-reader 

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