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Awakening Africa's Sleeping Giant' explores the feasibility of restoring international competitiveness and growth in African agriculture through the identification of products and production systems that can underpin rapid development of a competitive commercial agriculture. Based on a careful examination of the factors that contributed to the successes achieved in Brazil and Thailand, as well as comparative analysis of evidence obtained through detailed case studies of three African countries—Mozambique, Nigeria, and Zambia—the authors argue that opportunities abound for farmers in Africa to regain international competitiveness, especially in light of projected stronger world markets for agricultural commodities over the long term. This provides reasons for optimism regarding the future prospects for agriculture as a major source of inclusive growth in many parts of Africa.

Over the past several decades, the private sector has assumed a larger role in developing improved technology for food and agriculture. Private companies fund nearly all food processing research and development (R&D) and perform a growing share of production-oriented R&D for agriculture. In addition, institutional partnerships for public–private research collaboration are growing in the United States and other countries. This article outlines the major forces driving these changes and offers an interpretive framework to explore some of the implications for the volume and nature of research performed by the public and private sectors. One of the critical issues is whether public agricultural research complements and thereby stimulates additional private agricultural R&D investments. Another important issue concerns the role and contribution of alternative public–private partnership arrangements. To date, changes in the institutional structure of public and private agricultural research have outpaced systematic investigation, and new theoretical and empirical research is needed to help guide policy and address key societal challenges, such as climate change, clean energy, water scarcity, food safety, and health.

In this article, we develop a dynamic model to show how membership in agricultural cooperatives influences smallholder farmers' decisions to invest in organic soil amendments and chemical fertilizer. The model considers management decisions of heterogonous producers within an intertemporal framework, with the decision to join the cooperative assumed to be endogenous. Farm-level data of apple farmers from three provinces in China are used to estimate the impact of cooperative membership on investment in organic soil amendments and chemical fertilizer. A recursive bivariate probit model that accounts for potential endogeneity of cooperative membership and selection bias is employed in the empirical analysis. The empirical results show that cooperative membership exerts a positive and statistically significant impact on the likelihood of investing in organic soil amendments. The findings also reveal that tenure security, human capital, farm size, and access to credit positively and significantly influence the probability of a farmer joining a cooperative and the likelihood of investing in soil quality measures.

At odds with a vast body of economic evidence reporting exceptionally high rates of return to investments in agricultural research and development (R&D), growth in public R&D spending for food and agriculture has slowed in numerous, especially rich, countries worldwide. The observed R&D spending behavior is consistent with a determination that the reported rates of return are perceived as implausible by policy makers. We examine this notion by scrutinizing 2,242 investment evaluations reported in 372 separate studies from 1958 to 2011. We find that the internal rate of return (IRR) is the predominant summary measure of investment performance used in the literature despite methodological criticisms dating back more than a half century. The reported IRRs imply rates of return that are implausibly high. We investigate the reasons for these implausibly high estimates by analytically comparing the IRR to the modified internal rate of return (MIRR). The MIRR addresses several methodological concerns with using the IRR, has the intuitive interpretation as the annual compounding interest rate paid by an investment, and is directly related to the benefit–cost ratio. To obtain more credible rate of return estimates, we then develop a novel method for recalibrating previously reported IRR estimates using the MIRR when there is limited information on an investment's stream of benefits and costs. Our recalibrated estimates of the rate of return are more modest (median of 9.8% versus 39% per year); however, they are still substantial enough to question the current scaling back of public agricultural R&D spending in many countries.

The past 50–100 years have witnessed dramatic changes in agricultural production and productivity, driven to a great extent by public and private investments in agricultural research, with profound implications especially for the world's poor. In this article, we first discuss how the high-income countries like the United States represent a declining share of global agricultural output while middle-income countries like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia represent a rising share. We then look at the differing patterns of agricultural inputs across countries and the divergent productivity paths taken by their agricultural sectors. Next we examine productivity more closely and the evidence that the global rate of agricultural productivity growth is declining—with potentially serious prospects for the price and availability of food for the poorest people in the world. Finally we consider patterns of agricultural research and development efforts.

Abstract In this article, we employ Bayesian hierarchical modeling to better capture and communicate the uncertainties surrounding the transformation of U.S. public agricultural research and development (R&D) expenditures to knowledge capital stocks as well as its contribution to the historic growth of U.S. agricultural total factor productivity. Compared to studies based on classical statistics, analytical methods grounded in Bayesian inference explicitly incorporate existing information and permit revision of our knowledge regarding the distribution of the unknown model parameters as additional information becomes available. Bayesian hierarchical modeling is particularly useful in statistically estimating the underlying parameters of the R&D lag weight structure, as well as the R&D knowledge stocks given observed data on agricultural productivity and R&D expenditures. Our results show a significant level of uncertainty on the R&D lag weight structure, indicating that published assumptions about the R&D lag structure can now be tested and validated against available data. Estimating the R&D lag weights and knowledge stocks also make a large difference in the uncertainties surrounding economic returns from R&D investments. Indeed, our results show that the best-fit linear model yields slightly higher mean returns to R&D spending relative to the log model results and have significantly less uncertainty. This suggests that marginal returns to U.S. public agricultural research spending might have remained relatively constant despite a century of growth in expenditure. Furthermore, we find that such investments could take a longer time to bear fruit than previously realized.

A critical analysis of World Bank's agricultural assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa.This study assesses the development effectiveness of World Bank assistance in addressing constraints to agricultural development in Africa over the period of fiscal 1991-2006.This region faces a variety of constraints that make its development a complex challenge.

This research explores the origins of observed differences in time preference across countries and regions. Exploiting a natural experiment associated with the expansion of suitable crops for cultivation in the course of the Columbian Exchange, the research establishes that pre-industrial agro-climatic characteristics which were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment triggered selection, adaptation, and learning processes that generated a persistent positive effect on the prevalence of long-term orientation in the contemporary era. Furthermore, the research establishes that these agro-climatic characteristics have had a culturally embodied impact on economic behavior such as technological adoption, education, saving, and smoking.

Unhealthy foods and tobacco remain the leading causes of non-communicable disease (NCDs). These are key agricultural commodities for many countries, and NCD prevention policy needs to consider how to influence production towards healthier options. There has been little scholarship to bridge the agriculture with the public health literature that seeks to address the supply of healthy commodities. This scoping review synthesizes the literature on government agricultural policy and production in order to 1) present a typology of policies used to influence agricultural production, 2) to provide a preliminary overview of the ways that impact is assessed in this literature, and 3) to bring this literature into conversation with the literature on food and tobacco supply. This review analyzes the literature on government agricultural policy and production. Articles written in English and published between January 1997 and April 2018 (20-year range) were included. Only quantitative evaluations were included. Studies that collected qualitative data to supplement the quantitative analysis were also included. One hundred and three articles were included for data extraction. The following information was extracted: article details (e.g., author, title, journal), policy details (e.g., policy tools, goals, context), methods used to evaluate the policy (e.g., outcomes evaluated, sample size, limitations), and study findings. Fifty four studies examined the impact of policy on agricultural production. The remaining articles assessed land allocation ( n  = 25) (e.g., crop diversification, acreage expansion), efficiency ( n  = 23), rates of employment including on- and off-farm employment ( n  = 18), and farm income ( n  = 17) among others. Input supports, output supports and technical support had an impact on production, income and other outcomes. Although there were important exceptions, largely attributed to farm level allocation of labour or resources. Financial supports were most commonly evaluated including cash subsidies, credit, and tax benefits. This type of support resulted in an equal number of studies reporting increased production as those with no effects. This review provides initial extrapolative insights from the general literature on the impact of government policies on agricultural production. This review can inform dialogue between the health and agricultural sector and evaluative research on policy for alternatives to tobacco production and unhealthy food supply.

Increasing the world’s food supply has depended heavily on increasing agricultural productivity, which in turn depends on investments in research and development (R&D). This article synthesizes findings from more than 40 studies on how R&D investments affect agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) in various parts of the world. The article breaks out the relative contributions to TFP growth of R&D by public institutions, private companies, and the CGIAR (a consortium of international agricultural research centers), including international technology spillovers. Major differences emerge between global regions in sources and efficiency of R&D capital. Developed countries appear to have benefitted more from private and international R&D spillovers than developing countries.