Suchergebnisse

What is the future of food? Everyone agrees that feeding the world in the decades ahead will require substantial increases in crop yields. But how we get there has become a remarkably contentious question because of biotechnology. What should be biotechnology s role in assuring affordable and sustainably grown food for all? How we answer this question now will have profound ramifications for decades to come. The chapters in this book confront the controversy over biotechnology with new analyses and insights from economists and technologists. The topics covered include the differences in perceptions about biotechnology among rich and poor countries; the effects of rich-country restrictions on international trade in genetically modified crops on the welfare of poorer countries; the effects of intellectual property rights on the bioscience done by public agencies the world over; and the economic impacts of biotechnology. ; IFPRI5 ; PR ; 358 p.

What is the future of food? Everyone agrees that feeding the world in the decades ahead will require substantial increases in crop yields. But how we get there has become a remarkably contentious question because of biotechnology. What should be biotechnology's role in assuring affordable and sustainably grown food for all? How we answer this question now will have profound ramifications for decades to come. The chapters in this book confront the controversy over biotechnology with new analyses and insights from economists and technologists. The topics covered include the differences in perceptions about biotechnology among rich and poor countries; the effects of rich-country restrictions on international trade in genetically modified crops on the welfare of poorer countries; the effects of intellectual property rights on the bioscience done by public agencies the world over; and the economic impacts of biotechnology. ; PR ; IFPRI2

Has the golden age of U.S. agricultural productivity growth ended? We analyze the detailed patterns of productivity growth spanning a century of profound changes in American agriculture. We document a substantial slowing of U.S. farm productivity growth, following a late mid-century surge—20 years after the surge and slowdown in U.S. industrial productivity growth. We posit and empirically probe three related explanations for this farm productivity surge-slowdown: the time path of agricultural R&D-driven knowledge stocks; a big wave of technological progress associated with great clusters of inventions; and dynamic aspects of the structural transformation of agriculture, largely completed by 1980.

U.S corn output increased from 1.8 billion bushels in 1879 to 12.7 billion bushels in 2007. Concurrently, the footprint of production changed substantially. Failure to take proper account of movements means that productivity assessments likely misattribute sources of growth and climate change studies likely overestimate impacts. Our new spatial output indexes show that 16 to 21 percent of the increase in U.S. corn output over the 128 years beginning in 1879 was attributable to spatial movement in production. This long-run perspective provides historical precedent for how much agriculture might adjust to future changes in climate and technology.

This chapter provides a conceptual and empirical context for the case studies in Chapters 3 through 12. First, we briefly discuss the nature of market failures in agricultural research—both among firms within a country, and among nations—and the roles for government intervention in general. Next, we consider the distinguishing features of less-developed countries and what they might imply for R&D policy. We also discuss the important role of agricultural R&D and technology spillovers among nations, and the past dependence of the world's poorest countries on their richer neighbors. Next, we document the longer-term global story of institutions and investments in agricultural R&D, emphasizing the great importance of past achievements in agriculture and recent changes that leave grounds for concern about the prospects for the next 20 years and beyond. In the light of these facts, we contemplate the prospects for the future and the implied need to reinvent international collective action in agricultural R&D and reinvest in the associated global public goods institutions. ; PR ; IFPRI1; Pro-poor science and technology policies; Public Policy and Investment ; ISNAR