The Development of National Agricultural Research Capacity: India's Experience with the Rockefeller Foundation and Its Significance for Africa

Abstract

Technical change is one of the critical elements that determine the pace of agricultural growth in developing countries. International agricultural research centers currently initiate much of the scientific work necessary for technical change, but individual countries also need to be able to identify what is relevant in the existing stock of international knowledge, to conduct adaptive research and farm-level tests, and thus to tailor techniques discovered in the laboratory to the specific requirements of different farming locations.1 These functions require investments in national scientific and technical institutions. The public sector is heavily involved in this enterprise because agricultural research requires lumpy investments, involves externalities, gives rise to public goods, and is subject to long gestation lags. As a measure of the scale of the effort of multilateral and bilateral official donors in supporting farm technology development at the national and international levels, the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) spent $163 million worldwide in 1985.2 Despite these expenditures, the process by which countries develop their own agricultural research capacity is little understood, as are the links in the long chain of research, experimentation, adaptation, and dissemination of technology. The theory of induced innovation, for instance, which explains technical change and institutional innovation as the result of relative factor scarcities, tends to treat as a "black box" the process of national capacity-building.3 Others have postulated that the demand for technical change reflects pressures from interest groups, but this approach has limited value as an explanation