CGIAR Fund

According to a 2008 study on potato improvement, varieties originating from the CGIAR are now planted to more than 1 million hectares, double the area documented just 5 years before.

The estimated rates of return on the CGIAR’s investment in all crop improvement research range from 39 percent in Latin America to more than 100 percent in Asia and in the Middle East and North Africa.

Recent research documents a steady decline in the variability of maize and wheat yields over the last 40 years, which is statistically associated with the spread of more stress-resistant varieties.

More stable maize and wheat yields generate benefits with an estimated annual value of US$149 million and $143 million, respectively, more than the total amounts spent annually on maize and wheat breeding for the developing world.

Research aimed at maintaining resistance to a single major disease of wheat — leaf rust — generated benefits from 1973 to 2007 that are currently worth $5.4 billion.

A 2009 study aimed at quantifying benefits from CGIAR research on yield stability estimat­ed that the global economic value of genetic resistance to various wheat diseases amounts to as much as $2.0 billion annually.

The production and delivery of a vaccine for East Coast fever — a tick-transmitted disease that threatens some 25 million cattle in 11 countries of eastern, central and southern Africa
— is being placed in the hands of private sector partners. It is expected to save more than a million cattle, with benefits worth up to US$270 million a year in the countries where the disease is now endemic.

As the impacts of climate change emerge, including more frequent and severe drought and flooding, CGIAR crop improvement research is developing new and more resilient generations of cereal varieties:

A landmark 2003 study on the impact of crop improvement research from 1965 to 1998 painted a counterfactual scenario of what the global food system would be like without CGIAR research. It concluded that:

Developing countries would be producing 7-8 percent less food.

Their cultivated area would be 11-13 million hectares greater at the expense primary forests and other fragile environments.

Their per capita food consumption would be 5 percent lower, on average.

Some 13-15 million more children would be malnourished.

The study also noted that for every US$1 dollar invested in CGIAR research, $9 worth of additional food is produced in developing countries.

In addition to improving all of the world’s major food crops, CGIAR researchers have achieved, for the first time ever, dramatic productivity gains in a tropical food fish.

Selective breeding of the Nile tilapia resulted in a highly productive strain that grows faster and survives better than local ones, offering yields that are 25 to nearly 80 percent higher in the five Southeast Asian countries where the “super tilapia” was introduced and evaluated during the mid-1990s. In all of these countries, the new strain has generated additional income and employment on both large- and small-scale fish farms, while lowering market prices by about 10 percent and thus benefiting consumers significantly. In the Philippines alone, increased employment in the tilapia industry has benefited 300,000 people.

The poverty reduction numbers for India are even more impressive — 14 million people moved out of poverty between 1991 and 1999.

Several studies published in recent years have documented the impacts of the CGIAR as a whole either at the global level or in specific regions.

The economic benefits of the CGIAR as a whole were estimated to range from about US$14 billion to more than $120 billion. Even under quite conservative assumptions, the benefits of research have been roughly double the investment.

CGIAR research has had less impact in Africa than in Asia, but work in the former region began a decade later and under quite difficult conditions. Even so, a number of impact studies suggest that African agriculture can produce successes on a par with those unfolding elsewhere, delivering large returns on the CGIAR’s significant investment in the region.

In the late 1980s, Africa witnessed one of the CGIAR’s most spectacular research achievements since the Green Revolution — biological control of two devastating insect pests of the tropical root crop cassava. The economic returns — reaching a current value US$9 billion for research on just one of the pests, the cassava mealybug — far exceed the CGIAR’s total investment in Africa since 1971.

Crop research has yielded important results in Africa as well.

As a result of maize improvement in West and Central Africa from 1971 to 2005, farmers are planting improved varieties, derived mostly from CGIAR research, on about 60 percent of the total maize area, with economic benefits estimated at $2.9 billion annually.

Improved varieties of cowpea, which provide both food and livestock feed, are being widely adopted in the dry savannas of West Africa, with estimated benefits of $299 million to $1.1 billion expected to accrue during 2000-2020.

New Rice for Africa, or NERICA, which combines the high yields of Asian rice with African rice’s resistance to local pests and diseases, has spread to about 250,000 hectares in upland areas, helping reduce national rice import bills and generating higher incomes in rural communities.

Recent research has also begun to document nutritional benefits from improved crop varieties. In Mozambique, the introduction of new orange-fleshed sweet potato significantly increased the intake of vitamin A among young children in 850 households, according to a 2007 study.

The results of CGIAR research on natural resource management have proved harder to implement and evaluate than its work on crop improvement. Nonetheless, a set of seven case studies published in 2007 indicates that this research is giving highly positive returns on investment, based just on the benefits for agricultural productivity. If methodologies were available for gauging the environmental benefits as well, the returns would no doubt be much higher.

The practice of no-tillage, which is spreading rapidly in the rice-wheat systems of South Asia’s Indo-Gangetic Plain, has been shown to reduce farmers’ production costs by 10 percent and to raise crop productivity by the same amount, generating economic benefits on the order of US$165 million since 1990. This does not include the substantial environ­mental gains resulting from the conservation of water, sequestration of carbon in the soil and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

New information and tools provided to conservationists during the 1990s is being used to monitor some 37 million hectares of forest globally, resulting in better management of this diminishing resource and contributing to more sustainable livelihoods for forest dwellers.

Development impact depends not just on new technologies but on better policies that offer rural people the means and incentives to invest in sustainable agricultural production and resource use. While hard to measure, the impacts of CGIAR policy research and advocacy appear to be substantial, as suggested by recent case studies indicating benefits worth millions of dollars.

Research on the liberalization of rice prices in Vietnam during the mid-1990s led to the relaxation of rice export quotas and of internal restrictions on trade, generating benefits worth US$45-91million.

Shifts in Syria’s policies on fertilizer distribution and barley prices in arid zones starting in the mid-1980s have contributed to increased barley output through more efficient fertilizer use, leading to improved livestock nutrition, with benefits worth $73.4 million.

Research and advocacy aimed at decriminalizing the marketing of milk by small-scale vendors in Kenya created benefits for producers and consumers having an estimated value of $44-283 million.

In the Philippines, improved policies on pesticides — starting in the late 1980s and involving the regulation of highly toxic products on rice and the training of rural health officers — has resulted so far in benefits valued at $117 million.