International Research and Third World Agriculture: Discussion

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Dalrymple, over the years, has done a yeoman's service in recording for the benefit of a wide range of interested parties the progress in adoption of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice in the developing nations. He is the recognized authority in this subject and has spent untold hours relentlessly tracking down the illusive data. I would like to suggest that Dalrymple add another string to his bow. It would be extremely useful if he would also record the world price trends for rice, wheat, and fertilizer and analyze how the relative benefits of technological change have varied over time between producer and consumer. For example, today, with the depressed world rice prices caused by the success of the new technology, many Asian farmers find themselves in a cost-price squeeze. The benefits have shifted to the consumers, and in light of this, the World Bank might reconsider applying pressure to national programs to have farmers pay for irrigation. Evenson is a data hound of a different sort. When he loses the scent, rather than circling, he sits down like a good economist and makes an assumption. Not all researchers will be comfortable with the Evenson-Pray assumption that the proportion of research expenditures allotted to specific commodities in a given country can be derived on the basis of data on the number of published articles reported by the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau. The authors set out to determine what impact the international agricultural research centers (IARCs) have had on the growth of research expenditures for agriculture in the national research systems. They develop a two-stage least squares model treating annual spending by commodity on research (RES) and on extension (EXTED) as dependent on foreign aid for research from all sources (AID) and a number of exogenous variables hypothesized to account forthe year-to-year variability in these expenditures in twenty-five countries over the period 1972 to 1980. The results of the regression analysis show that most of the signs of the coefficients are consistent with expectations. The results suggest that spending for research in the IARCs has had a positive impact on spending both for field crop research and for livestock and horticultural research in the national programs. Furthermore, the impact is positively associated with the size of the country. I do not have great confidence in the estimated magnitudes of changes in research and extension spending. However, the analysis does raise some extremely important questions that deserve further investigation. To what degree do research funds from foreign donors complement, supplement, or simply substitute for research funds in national programs? Does the bias reflected by the foreign donors have a positive effect on the national research program? As the authors suggest, their analysis is a useful start to understanding the complicated relationship between national and international research. Anderson, Herdt, and Scobie have written a brief summary of a very comprehensive evaluation of the contribution of international agricultural research and, more specifically, the international agricultural research centers (IARCs) to world agricultural development. The summary does not begin to do justice to the study itself, which contains a wide range of useful reports by noted scholars on various aspects of international agricultural research plus a number of country case studies. The earlier research reported by Dalrymple and by Evenson and Pray was commissioned as a part of the study. Not surprisingly some of the same themes are repeated. The major benefits to date have been in the major cereal grains, wheat, and rice. The IARCs are seen as having Randolph Barker is a professor, Department of Agricultural Economics, Cornell University.