English

The promise and challenges inherent in agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa prompted the conference,“Agricultural R&D: Investing in Africa’s Future—Analyzing Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities,” which was convened by the Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) initiative—facilitated by the International Food Policy Research Institute(IFPRI)—and the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA). The goal of the conference was to define a road map for revitalizing agricultural research in the region focusing on four principal themes:

India has substantially increased its public funding of agricultural research since the late 1990s. This trend will likely continue in years to come. The Indian government’s strong commitment to agricultural R&D has been rewarded with high economic and social returns to research investments. Nonetheless, India’s research intensity ratio, measured as public agricultural R&D spending as a share of agricultural output, continues to be relatively low.

Chapter 5: Agricultural R&D in Africa: Investment, human capacity, and policy constraint, in: Improving Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems OECD Conference Proceedings

This conference proceedings from the OECD Conference on Agricultural Knowledge Systems (AKS), held in Paris inJune 2011, discusses experiences and approaches to AKS explores how to foster development and adoption of innovation to meet global food security and climate change challenges.

Maintaining, Disseminating, and Analyzing Agricultural R&D Data in Sub-Saharan Africa

The objective of ASTI’s recent subregional technical review workshops was to elicit feedback from national collaborators in Sub-Saharan Africa on their experiences in implementing ASTI’s national survey rounds and to explore ideas and suggestions as to how ASTI’s activities in the region can be improved and strengthened. The discussion during the workshops focused on all aspects of the process—specifically, collecting, synthesizing, analyzing, disseminating, and using ASTI data.

This report presents an overview of Iran’s national agricultural R&D system in terms of institutional developments and recent trends in human and financial resources based on data collected under the Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) initiative.

Since the turn of the millennium, total public agricultural R&D investments and capacities increased in most ASARECA countries. The growth in investments was largely the result of increased government commitments, although agricultural R&D continues to be highly dependent on donor funding and development bank loans. Furthermore, increased government contributions were most often directed toward salary increases and improvements to infrastructure and equipment.

After a decade of stagnation during the 1990s, investments and human resource capacity in public agricultural research and development (R&D) averaged more than 20 percent growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during 2001–2008. In 2008, the region spent $1.7 billion on agricultural R&D (in 2005 purchasing power parity dollars)—or $0.8 billion (in 2005 constant US dollars)—and employed more than 12,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) agricultural researchers.