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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Sun, 25 May 2014 17:56:27 +0200
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This is Julien de Meyer, until recently working as Agricultural Research Officer in the FAO Research and Extension Unit in Rome and now a freelance consultant in Australia.

FAO in collaboration with the SOLINSA project (www.solinsa.net, funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission) recently conducted a case study in South Tyrol in Italy to assess their apple production innovation system. I led that study and we found that in the last decades, the productivity of the system had increased dramatically: In 40 years, from 1960 to 2000, the labor needed to farm a 1 ha apple orchard was reduced from 1000 man/hours to 450 man/hours and at the same time the yield increased from 25 to 55 tons per ha (FAO, 2014). This was due to a combination of factors with an important role played by the research and extension system. As well, once production was increased, research in Dynamic Controlled Atmosphere for long term storage of apples was successful and allowed producers to reduce post harvest losses, avoid the use of chemicals for conservation and increase their ability to store apple for up to 12 months giving a significant marketing advantage. In this case, it took only 20 years from the beginning of the research process to a wide adoption of the technology. Thanks partly to its investment in agriculture research, South Tyrol evolved from being one of the poorest provinces in Italy at the end of the Second World War to becoming one of the richest today, an obvious economic impact.

We tried as well to understand why the innovation system in South Tyrol was becoming more efficient in addressing production and marketing constraints. What was the reason behind the reduced time lag between research and wide adoption ? This for me illustrates an important point regarding the non-economic impact of research. An often overlooked fact from epIA is that any research initiative, whether it is successful in developing technologies or proving or disproving a research hypothesis, increases the capacity of individual scientists working on it. This individual increase in capacity is then partly captured by their institutions (Gordon and Chadwick, 2007). In the case of South Tyrol, this then permeated the whole innovation system and in the case study, we reached the same conclusion as the economist Paul Romer (2001): "Knowledge builds on itself; the more we discover things, the better we get at the process” (Interview with Joel Kurtzman for the review periodical Strategy + Business, 20 November 2001).

An Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) paper by Gordon and Chadwick in 2007 looked specifically at capacity building in research and provides an interesting framework to evaluate it and some of their rule of thumb that could be used to develop the epIA mixed model. For example, they found that improvements in human capital explain around 30% of the increase in total factor productivity (TFP). Thus, accepting that all agriculture research process results in capacity improvement, we could then include in any ex post evaluation a value calculated from the annualised productivity growth increase in agriculture and the value of the research initiative being assessed. I recognize that calculating this value could present many empirical challenges. However, this value represents the often forgotten fact that agricultural research has a value as a public good that is independent of the specific results of the research initiative being assessed.

References:

- Gordon, J. and Chadwick, K. 2007. Impact assessment of capacity building and training: assessment framework and two case studies. ACIAR Impact Assessment Series Report No. 44, February 2007. http://impact.cgiar.org/sites/default/files//pdf/76.pdf (890 KB).
- FAO. Apple-producing family farms in South Tyrol: An agriculture innovation case study. Edited by J. de Meyer. Occasional papers on Innovation in Family Farming. 2014. In press.

Julien de Meyer
freelance consultant
Canberra
Australia
e-mail: jdemeyer (at) jandjworldwide.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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