The aggregate economic benefits of the national cultivar trials for maize in South Africa with specific reference to the Highveld region

The South African maize sector has been revolutionised from a system of production with low use of modern technologies to a leading maize producer in the African continent. That transformation is in part attributable to South Africa’s investment in the national maize cultivar trials, which have facilitated the adoption and use of maize cultivars that are highly adapted to commercial farmer localities, causing considerable gains in yields. The economic value of the public investment in the trials remains unknown. This study uses experimental yields spanning 1977 - 2012 to attribute the influence of the national maize cultivar trials to maize yield improvement on farmer localities in the Highveld region of South Africa. Using attribution methods, the study estimates that 24.3 kg per hectare of extra maize yields accrued to commercial maize producers because of the national maize trials. The economic value of these investments was found to be R1.4billion (in 2012 currency values). The study estimates that South Africa received R37 of benefit for every rand invested by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in the trials.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ragr202016-09-30hb201

Saving seeds: The economics of conserving crop genetic resources ex situ in the future harvest centres of the CGIAR

The conservation of genetic resources is vital to the maintenance of biodiversity and to the world's ability to feed its growing population. There are now more than a thousand genebanks worldwide involved in the ex situ (meaning ”away from the source”) storage of particular classes of crops. Since the 1970s, the eleven genebanks maintained by the centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have become pivotal to the global conservation effort. However, key policy and management issues - usually with economic dimensions - have largely been overlooked. This provided the impetus for a series of detailed economic studies, led by IFPRI, in collaboration with five CGIAR centres: CIAT (based in Colombia), CIMMYT (Mexico), ICARDA (Syria), ICRISAT (India) and IRRI (Philippines). This book reports these studies and discusses their wider implications. (Abstract © CAB ABSTRACTS, CAB International

South African agricultural R & D investments: Sources, structure, and trends, 1910-2007

The twentieth century saw substantive shifts in the structure, funding and conduct of public agricultural research and development (R&D) and related regulatory and extension activities in South Africa. Following a long period of steady (and at times quite rapid) growth beginning in the early twentieth century, real spending on public agricultural R&D has essentially flat lined since the 1970s. There has also been an erratic pattern of funding per scientist and a loss of scientific personnel in recent decades. Notably, South Africa has lost ground relative to its competitors in international commodity markets, such as the United States (US) and Australia in terms of the intensity of investment in agricultural R&D. In the absence of changes to these trends, these developments may well have enduring, and detrimental, consequences for the productivity performance and competitiveness of South African agriculture. They deserve serious policy attention as the twenty-first century unfolds, with a firm eye to the long-run given the lengthy lags (often many decades) that typify the relationship between public agricultural R&D spending and productivity growth. © 2011 Agricultural Economics Association of South Africa.Revie

Re-Examining the Reported Rates of Return to Food and Agricultural Research and Development: Reply

Hurley, Rao and Pardey (2014) analytically and empirically evaluate the internal rate of return (IRR) vis a vis the modified internal rate of return (MIRR) for investments in agricultural research and development (R&D). They find that estimates of the IRR are 2.5 to 5 times larger than the MIRR for a wide range of assumptions, leading them to question the value of the IRR as a metric to represent the rate of return to agricultural R&D. Oehmke (2016) defends the IRR by arguing that it has important properties that the MIRR does not possess. In this article, we critically examine these properties demonstrating that some are not inherent to the MIRR. For other properties, we simply disagree with Oehmke’s assessment of their desirability. Therefore, we are not compelled to change our original recommendation

Recent Commodity Price Movements in Historical Perspective

Important agricultural commodity prices more than tripled from prices observed in 2005 and 2006 to those observed in the spring and sum-mer of 2008. Prices subsequently fell precip-itously so that by early November 2008 (and continuing in the subsequent few months), the near-term futures prices of corn, wheat, and soybeans stood about 50–70 % higher than be-fore the price run-up began.1 The huge percentage price increases in 2007 and 2008 demanded attention from the press and policymakers concerned about food price increases (Washington Post 2008; Lazear 2008; Glauber 2008). Of even greater con-cern are impacts on hunger among the poor in poor countries (Benson et al. 2008). Many economists summarized the potential sources of the price jumps and assessed their rela-tive importance (McCalla 2008; Trostle 2008a; OECD 2008). My quick assessment of this lit-erature is that once the specific price changes to be explained and time periods have been stan-dardized, economists are in reasonable agree-ment about the likely causal factors and their impacts, at least in broad terms. My aims here are modest. I do not attempt to attribute recent price changes to such fac-tors as: (a) biofuels policy; (b) jumps in input costs due to energy price shocks; (c) reduced farm subsidies in Europe; (d) exchange rate movements; (e) growth in demand in develop-ing countries; (f) weather shocks; (g) lack of adequate stocks; (h) border policies in export-ing and importing countries; or (i) speculative movements in organized commodity markets