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Research

Food needs will continue to expand in developing countries in the future. In the past, such needs have been met by both expanding the area under cultivation and increasing productivity on the land in production. Most areas of the world have placed their good land under cultivation, which means that they will either have to expand on poorer land or further increase the productivity of the land that they have in production. Increasing productivity is by far the more promising route both in terms of cost and minimizing environmental disruption. But increasing productivity requires new knowledge – both to maintain yields and to improve the quantity and quality of production. The needed knowledge is primarily biological in nature, but also includes the social sciences.

The primary mechanism for generating new or additional agricultural knowledge is organized and structured research. While building on scientific knowledge, such efforts must also give attention to indigenous farmer knowledge. Because of (1) certain common problems that exist in many countries and (2) the wide variety of growing conditions throughout the world and even within countries, agricultural research must be carried out at several levels; global, regional, national, and state/ province. The challenge is to sort out the tasks to be done and to handle them at the most appropriate level. Some problems, especially requiring fairly sophisticated science, might more efficiently be done in centralized laboratories; others are more closely related to field practices and can be more decentralized. This variation requires corresponding flexibility in funding mechanisms, which is not always present.

In the case of developing countries, about 95% of the funding spent on agricultural research in the past has been at the national or sub-national level. Much of this, especially in the poorer nations, and particularly in Africa, has been provided by outside donors such as USAID. Less than 5% has been carried out at the international or global level. Virtually all of the research has been in the public sector, but the private sector is becoming more important in the more advanced developing nations. Global agricultural research, even though it represents a small portion of overall funding and even smaller portion of research staff, has proven to be a very efficient and effective way of not only carrying out research (particularly in the area of genetic resources and plant variety improvement), but providing scientific leadership and encouragement to national programs.

The Agency supports agricultural and environmental related research in 3 main ways.

  1. For the past thirty years, the most important organizational vehicle for conducting global/international/regional research has been the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The CGIAR is an informal group of donors (about 60 at present) which has its headquartered at the World Bank in Washington. It sponsors 16 international research centers distributed throughout the world (13 in developing countries) which cover a wide array of basic food commodities and natural resource issues. In addition, the CGIAR is currently sponsoring a Challenge Program which is designed to tackle problems of global and regional importance and that bring a wide variety of researchers together. A small number of other international research centers outside of the CGIAR also carry out important related work. The CGIAR itself basically represents a multilateral activity, but has always had a bilateral dimension in that the centers have taken on special projects that are usually national in nature. In either case, the emphasis is on producing public goods that are freely available to all.

  2. Since 1978, USAID has supported research, education, and outreach through the Collaborative Research Support Programs (CRSP). The CRSPs harness the expertise of U.S. universities in low-cost, high-impact programs that contribute knowledge, trained personnel, and technology to agriculture worldwide in the fight against hunger and poverty. The nine CRSP programs funded by USAID and other collaborating organization focus research upon crops, including beans and cowpeas, sorghum and millet, and peanuts; broadening access to factors and strengthening input systems; livestock; integrated pest management; pond dynamics and aquaculture; soil management; and sustainable agriculture and natural resources management. CRSP programs help build national agricultural research capacity in developing countries as well as benefit American agriculture. CRSP programs embody the mutual dependence of research, outreach, and training, in which training is integrated with research, and applied solutions require outreach.

  3. The Agency also funds research grant programs to promote development-focused technical cooperation among Middle Eastern countries, and the utilization of U.S. and Israeli expertise by developing countries. The Middle East Regional Cooperation (MERC) Program and the U.S.-Israel Cooperative Development Research (CDR) Program both fund competitively reviewed, applied research projects. CDR supports joint research projects involving U.S. and Israeli scientists working with counterparts in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on topics relevant to the needs of the developing-country partners. MERC supports development in the Middle East via projects that involve direct Arab-Israeli cooperation. Developing-country institutions receive a substantial share of the funds from each of the nearly 100 CDR and MERC grants for the training of scientists, laboratory equipment, and other capacity-strengthening measures. These research programs are open to nearly all relevant technical topics and have produced advances in saline and arid lands agriculture, enhanced understanding of emerging diseases and other threats to human health, improved water management technology, advances in biological pest management, and improved systems for natural resources and wildlife management.

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