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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Thu, 15 May 2014 16:44:27 +0200
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This is Dick Tinsley again.



As I have been reviewing the various contributions to this E-consultation, I get the impression that acceptance of agriculture research results is 100% discretionary on the part of the farmers including smallholder farmers, and the transfer of knowledge on research innovations is all that is needed for willing farmers to apply it. I would question this, and wonder how you would factor into your ex-post facto evaluation farmers who have understood the innovations, like it and want to adopt it, but don’t have the means to do so, or do so only on a limited area, while make some substantial modifications to accommodate their limited operational resource base. Normally, I look at this in terms of sacrificing quality for extent by which I mean as crop establishment is delayed and potential yields are declining, are the farmers better off planting 0.5 ha of maize at the recommended rate or 1.0 ha of maize at 0.5 the recommended rate? Thus they are accepting the innovations in a modified form. Does this not count as a positive impact? Or do farmers have to accept innovations in their entirety? What can be done to enhance the farmers ability to accept innovations over wider area. I think one has to accept a smallholder primary objective is not maximum yield on an individual parcel, but maximum returns to all farm enterprises and will sacrifice returns on one parcel to enhance returns on another. A concept that can easily bewilder researchers focusing on a single enterprise or field.



Also, I am wondering if the ex-post facto evaluation of research results is fully factoring in the limited financial capacity of most developing country governments in which there is virtually no tax base to derive the revenues in which to provide research/extension services. I usually describe this as a financially suppressed economy in which consumer prices may be 1/3rd to 1/5th developed country prices, but wages are only 1/12th resulting in most of the population spending 80% or more of wages just to feed their families with a meager diet. Since this income cannot be taxed without starving the populations the tax base is severely restricted and with that government services. Often the services are on paper and staffed but with no operating fund with which to function. Thus the term financially stalled. In such case what services are available may be largely on the honor/gratuity/baksheesh system for which the reliability has to be questioned. This might be particularly true for such things as certified seed and soil test results taken for granted in most developed countries. See http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/FinancialSuppressed.htm, http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/FinanciallyStalled.htm and http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/VarietyImprovement.htm.



This would include highways which someone mentioned [Atse Yapi in Message 21 mentioned the role they had played in contributing to impacts of a new sorghum variety in Chad although costs of the road construction were not included in the economic epIA...Moderator]. I fully endorse this as essential in getting things moved about. However, donor funding is usually limited to main highway with little support for the unpaved feeder roads that can wonder off 100s km into the bush of Africa. Once off the tarmac, the ton/kg transport costs can triple, which can almost be transparently accounted for. This does wonders to increase input costs and lower farmer produce prices as it is the farmers at the end of the road that have to pay for remoteness. This extra cost will substantially compromise acceptance of research results by shifting the optimal application rates for fertilizer etc. This could give the impression of farmers non-accepting an innovation when they have wisely modified it to their local conditions. This could be a positive but limited impact of research results.



Dr. Dick Tinsley

Soil and Crop Science Department, 

Colorado State University, 

Fort Collins, 

80523 USA

Richard.Tinsley (at) colostate.edu



[At this point, I would just like to remind participants that the focus of this e-mail conference is on the approaches and methodologies used for ex post impact assessment of agricultural research. While discussion of the issues that can increase or favour the positive impacts of agricultural research is tremendously important, it goes well beyond the narrower focus of this particular 4-week long e-mail conference which is about the methodologies and approaches used to measure these impacts. Section 4 of the Background Document (available at http://www.fao.org/docrep/019/as549e/as549e.pdf) describes the specific questions which participants are asked to address during the conference...Moderator].



[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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