The genetic and economic impact of the CIMMYT wheat breeding program on local producers in the Yaqui Valley,Sonora Mexico

This article quantifies the productivity gain from CIMMYT‐released semidwarf bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) cultivars over time, using test plot data from Mexico's Yaqui Valley. Previous studies have shown a deceleration in irrigated wheat yield growth since the 1980s, which could be due to slowing increase in genetic potential. Our results suggest that CIMMYT cultivars contributed a 0.46% annual increase (about 38 kg/ha annually) to wheat yields in the Yaqui Valley, which raised local wheat producers’ revenue by an average of $4 million annually for the period 1990 to 2002, and by approximately $9 million in 2002.     

The Economic impact of public agricultural research and development in the United States

In this article, we examine the relationship between public investments in agricultural research and development and the productivity‐enhancing benefits they generate. Knowledge productivity functions are estimated for U.S. agriculture using data on multifactor productivity and public knowledge stocks. We examine the time‐series properties of the data and compare alternative econometric estimation procedures. The results are used to calculate economic performance measures such as internal rates of return and benefit‐cost ratios. The real rate of return to public investments in agricultural research and development in the United States is in the range of 8–10% per annum.     

The rise and fall of public sector plant breeding in the United Kingdom: a causal chain model of basic and applied research and diffusion

This paper examines the barley and wheat breeding programmes of the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI), which was the most successful public plant breeding institute in the UK, until privatization in 1987. The PBI's shares in barley and wheat seed sales are explained, showing that the success with barley was largely a matter of serendipity, whereas the wheat programme followed a more normal pattern. For wheat, the causal chain, or recursive, model decomposes the well-documented link between research expenditures and increases in agricultural productivity into three stages. These are the effects of R&D expenditures on basic research output, measured by publications, the effect of publications and applied R&D expenditures on trial plot yields, and the diffusion of the trial plot technologies, which raises yields on farms. Applying the model to the FBI's wheat varieties allows estimation of the lag structures. In contrast to the results for aggregate agricultural research, for a single plant breeding programme alone there is a considerable lead time before there is any response, followed by a lag distribution only a few years long. The returns to the R&D investments are calculated from the causal chain model, from single equation estimates and by evaluating the yield advantage of the PBI varieties. All three approaches give consistent results, which show that the returns to barley and wheat alone were sufficient to support the entire PBI budget and still give rates of return to applied research of between 14 and 25%. The return to the basic science expenditures of the John Innes Institute has a lower bound of 17%, but must have been even higher than for the PBI if the other Institutes were taken into account. The paper concludes by commenting on the effects of the privatization of the PBI.