Agricultural Research Institutions and Priorities in an Era of Resource Scarcity: Discussion

Abstract

The three papers by Norton, Pardey, and Alston (NPA), McCalla and Ryan (MR), and Just and Huffman (JH) address very different topics; therefore, any discussion of them should probably be mainly on an individual basis. There is, nonetheless, some common underlying perspective. NPA and MR acknowledge the difficulty in research priority setting when there are multiple objectives at stake. This gives rise to multiple trade-offs between economic efficiency, value of total output, equity, and sustainability. MR, addressing the research priority issue for the CGIAR system in a global context, add as another trade-off the consideration of the strengths of the national partners who collaborate with the CGIAR system. NPA add the complexity of setting research priorities across commodities, disciplines, geographical entities, and individual projects. JH point out the complex layering of modem science and technology which ranges from basic work in the so-called mother sciences, to pretechnology science, to applied sciences and, finally, to technology development and commercialization. Thus, there is a real danger in oversimplifying the R&D process and in overgeneralizing recommendations about research organization and priority setting. All three papers acknowledge the problem of shrinking real research funds. In the latter regard, some recent personal work has reminded me that in the U.S., for example, a 1975 agricultural research dollar was worth only about 37 cents in 1990. And over the last several years federal, and in some cases state, appropriations for agricultural research have been virtually constant in nominal dollars.