NC1034: Impact Analyses and Decision Strategies for Agricultural Research (NC1003)
Statement of Issues and Justification
Statement of Issues and Justification1. What is the need for the project as indicated by stakeholders?
The first stakeholder driven need is measurement of agricultural productivity growth and the contribution of agricultural research investment to that growth. Productivity is literally a measure of the amount of agricultural production one may obtain from a given level of land, water, and other inputs. Conversely, it also measure the amount of resources required to achieve a given level of production. Productivity growth then is a fundamental requirement in meeting demands for food, fiber, and biofuels without placing undue pressure on land, water, and environmental resources. Productivity growth is also necessary to maintain the competitiveness of US agriculture. Key policy questions here are (a) is productivity growth slowing down and contributing to rising global food prices and (b) is productivity growth on pace to provide for future global food security?
Agricultural research investment is a prime contributor to agricultural productivity growth. NC-1034 research examines the causal linkages between different measures innovative activity and productivity growth. Such measures include public and private research investment, patenting, and biotechnology field trials. There are long, but pervasive lags between research investment and productivity change. This means that changes in research investment today can have long-lasting implications for future productivity growth. There are public policy demands for an understanding of how research-funding decisions made today affect future productivity growth. Estimates of the rates of return to agricultural research are important to inform decisions about funding of agricultural research. There is ongoing demand for estimation of payoffs to agricultural research.
A second critical need that NC-1034 addresses is objective evaluation of the social impacts of new agricultural technologies. Ongoing public policy debates over the first generation of agricultural biotechnologies exemplify the need for objective analysis. In those debates, key questions included (a) how have new technologies affected producer returns and environmental quality? (b) How has changing structure and pricing strategies among input suppliers altered the distribution of gains between input supply firms, agricultural producers, and consumers; and (c) how have regulatory frameworks to manage risk affected the diffusion, returns, and sustainable use of new technologies? These questions will remain important in evaluating succeeding generations of agricultural technologies. NC-1034 will continue to address them.
Society has called upon the agricultural research system to address a broader array of issues. These include natural resource management, improved nutrition, and meeting competing demands from agriculture as a source of both food and fuel. There is thus a need to expand research evaluation methods to account for changes in environmental quality, consumer nutrition and health, and growing linkages between energy and agricultural sectors. This includes both anticipatory, ex ante evaluations of potential impacts of emerging technologies and ex post evaluations of the diffusion and impacts of recently deployed technologies. Ex ante analyses help policymakers anticipate potential impacts of new technologies, while ex post analyses allow lessons to be drawn from experience and to guide future research.
A third critical need is for systematic study of process of agricultural research itself. The contributions of agricultural research depend not only on the level of funding, but also the sources and mechanisms of funding and the organization of the research process. There have been dramatic changes in the organization and funding of agricultural research that pose challenges and present opportunities. The share of state agricultural experiment station (SAES) research funded by USDA has remained roughly constant. Yet, the share funded by state governments has declined, while the share funded by the private sector and other federal agencies has increased. This has led to the recent development of several multi-institute research partnerships between universities, federal labs, and private industries, particularly in the areas of biotechnology and biofuels R&D. The structure and performance of such collaborations merit serious research investigation to inform public policy debates about public-private research partnerships.
The Bayh-Dole Act altered the incentives for IPR protection and distribution of income from discoveries financed completely or partially by the federal government. This provided Land Grants and other universities with income-generating rights over discoveries. The Bayh-Dole Act was a major force behind the rapid growth of university technology transfer offices and associated increases in university patenting, licensing, and start-up companies, and increase in licensing income of public universities. Changes in intellectual property rights, however, have involved a trade-off between providing economic incentives and rewards for innovation and maintaining scientists access to information and technologies that serve as research tools. Finding the proper balance between IPR protection and access to research tools is critical to avoiding research delays and hindering our systems collective research effort.
Finally, there are public policy questions that arise from the transformation in the way USDA funds the Land Grants and other cooperating institutions. From 1993 to 2009, formula-based, Hatch funds fell from 49% to 33% of CSREES (now NIFA) administered funding, while competitive, National Research Initiative funding rose from 16% to 23%. NIFAs Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Competitive Grants Program promises to further transform U.S. agricultural research funding with greater emphasis on multi-year, multi-disciplinary, and multi-state projects. Policy questions include: (a) how will different institutions fair in this new funding environment? (b) How will they maintain base funding in an era of relatively less state and formula funding support? (c) To what extent can AFRI-promoted collaborations increase research spillover benefits across states?
2. What is the importance of the work and what are the consequences are if it is not done?
Members of NC-1034 (and its predecessor committees) have conducted pioneering work in (a) agricultural productivity measurement; (b) estimation of returns to agricultural research; (c) the determinants and effects of adoption of new agricultural technologies, particularly biotechnologies; (d) implications of changes in intellectual property rights for U.S. agriculture; (d) improved design of biotechnology regulations; and (e) evaluation of research funding mechanisms and processes. In fact, virtually all of the analyses of agricultural research conducted worldwide are based on methods developed by members of this group. Publications of group members have been widely cited in National Academy of Sciences studies of agricultural research and biotechnology.
What would be the consequences of the groups work were not done? Some consequences include: (i) a lack of an objective knowledge base to inform public policy debates concerning biotechnology and other new agricultural technologies; (ii) lack of an understanding and appreciation of the social contribution of agricultural research; and (iii) lack of understanding of barriers to productivity growth and the role of agricultural research in maintaining global food security and U.S. agricultural competitiveness.
3. What is the technical feasibility of the research?
NC-1034 members have developed robust methods to evaluate agricultural research systems and technologies. The groups record of accomplishment of significant publications speaks to the feasibility of such methods. Demands on agricultural research systems have expanded over time and so has the groups research methods. Members have drawn on a variety of methods, as problems require. These include applications of agricultural economics, industrial organization, environmental valuation, rural sociology, human health and nutrition assessment, and energy economics.
4. What are the advantages for doing the work as a multistate effort?
Adoption of technologies and their impacts spill over across state and international boundaries. While there is a certain value of studying impacts of new technologies in their local contexts, there is also value in the ability to compare and contrast how new technologies affect agricultural producers in different areas. Both federal agencies and commodity groups are interested in evaluations of technology that can be scaled-up to commodity-wide or national scale impacts. Multistate collaborations facilitate comparative analyses. They also provide economies of scope for NC-1034 members. Such economies include (a) the ability to pool resources and share data; (b) avoiding redundancy in research activities; (c) increasing complementarity in research (e.g. on member may work on one aspect of a general problem, while another research works on another); and (d) transfer of methods across research applications. Members can also pool expertise in different production systems. For example, comprehensive evaluation of herbicide resistant crop varieties requires knowledge of corn, soybean, and cotton production systems in very different agronomic regions. Pooling research expertise can help identify commonalities in new technologies as well as regional or crop-specific differences. Another advantage of multistate collaboration is that it allows members to benefit from knowledge gained by other members from other multi-disciplinary projects. For example, one NC-1034 may gain valuable knowledge from working on a project with plant breeders, while another may have gained knowledge from weed scientists. Multistate collaboration raises awareness of contributions in other fields of research and of researchers they may collaborate with in the future. 5. What would be the likely impacts will be from successfully continuing NC-1034s work?
We envision future contributions to build on previous ones. These include: (a) a continued stream of high impact publications; (b) continued contributions to the knowledge base for agricultural research systems and technologies as evidenced by contributions to National Academy of Sciences panels, EPA Science Advisory Panels, and responses to requests from other federal and state agencies; and (c) continued contributions to decision making in the area of biotechnology regulation.
Over the next five years, we also envision future areas of focus to include (i) bio-fortification; (ii) linkages between agricultural, forestry, and energy research in biofuels development; (iii) expanded use of precision agriculture and advanced information systems to apply inputs more precisely, reduce input costs, and minimize environmental degradation; (iv) new developments in nanotechnology; (v) expanded use of genetic markers; and (vi) mechanization in horticultural crops to address farm labor supply constraints.
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