man and Evenson, 2001). (For further details on changes in labor see Chapter 2.) Within agriculture specialization of tasks increased through industrialization. The 1920s saw expansion of the ammonia industry for fertilizers, development of the crop hybridization technique on a commercial scale (Buhler et al., 2002) as well as mechanization. With the number of farms declining and aggregate output growing, average output per farm grew rapidly (see Chapter 2 for changes in farm size and modernization of farms).
The main driver for the development of AKST in NAE after the Second World War has been technology development based on industrialization, globalization, policies and demand. The main direct driver of AKST during the early part of the period after the Second World War was a policy directed towards food sufficiency in NAE, to address the situation of food insecurity especially in Europe. Policies that led to a decline in real food prices greatly aided the growth of cities and allowed the rising living standards in North America and Western Europe. In Central and Eastern Europe industrialization of agriculture took place only after the Second World War as part of a planned economy and was more variable. This period was characterized by spectacular production gains (de Wit, 1986), through: (1) rapid integration of mechanization into farming activities, (2) increased use of inputs, e.g., fertilizers and other agro-chemicals, adoption of hybrid seeds and crop varieties that could utilize these inputs (see Chapter 2 of this assessment) and (3) increased levels of publicly funded R&D, particularly in plant and animal genetics and farm management. The discovery of the role and structure of DNA led to advances in genetics and the development of molecular biology. Legislation on intellectual property protection applied to living organisms was developed. Together these developments fundamentally changed the nature of agricultural sciences, public and private roles as well as the roles of locally provided and internationally traded agricultural goods and services (Alston et al., 1998).
Public AKST and AKST more generally, contributed to the industrialization and development of productivity. Jor-genson and Gollop (1992) showed that the average annual total factor productivity (TFP)7 growth in the agricultural sector over the 1947-1985 period exceeded the corresponding rate for the US private non-farm economy by more than 3.5 times and was more than double the rate of TFP growth for the manufacturing sector. For agriculture, productivity growth accounted for 82% of the growth of output, while for the rest of economy, productivity accounted for only 13% of the growth. Although there are some problems with correctly identifying causal relationships (Griliches, 1979), the evidence above and adopted from cross-sectional and
7 Productivity analysis is an economist's attempt to approximate the "ultimate" impact of technical change on useful output without trying to identify "intermediate" successful technologies or count innovations. To accomplish this, total factor productivity (TFP) expresses aggregate output per unit of aggregate input—rather than per unit of one input, say labor or land. The growth of aggregate output that cannot be explained by aggregate input—under the control of producers—is defined as TFP (Griliches, 1979; Jorgenson et al., 1987). |
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over-time variation of TFP in agriculture (Evenson, 1983) indicates that investments in public and private agricultural research, public agricultural extension and farmers' schools are a major part of the explanation for the growth in productivity. Public research and education have been at least as important as private R&D and market forces for change in livestock specialization, farm size and farmers' off-farm work participation (Busch et al., 1984; Huffman and Even-son, 2001). The strength of the relationship between public research and farm growth increased from about the early 1970s to the early 1980s. Private R&D and market forces have been relatively more important than public research and education for changing crop specialization. As profitability is influenced by local geoclimatic as well as economic conditions, good adoption decisions depend to a large extent on appropriate training (see Huffman, 1998b, for a summary of the evidence), which increases the profits of early adopters (OTA, 1992; Huffman and Evenson, 1993).
Following the restoration of the food supply after the Second World War, government concern in North America and Western Europe shifted towards supporting farmers' standards of living. Technological innovation remained important, as the new technologies generally used less labor to produce a given quantity of output at any given relative input price. However, the social welfare of rural communities and income parity for primary producers became dominant drivers of change in agricultural policies, with stabilization of prices being used as the main tool (James, 1971). The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), as formulated in the Treaty of Rome (1958), aimed to (1) guarantee food supplies at stable and reasonable prices, (2) ensure a fair standard of living for farmers and (3) improve agricultural productivity through technical progress and rational production systems that would employ labor more efficiently (see Chapter 2 for further information on CAP, trade and tariffs).
4.3.2 Impacts of paradigms in NAE AKST on low-income countries
In many developing countries, the basis for the agricultural development after the Second World War was built during colonialism, when the focus of agricultural research and extension was not on staple foods but on cash crops (such as sugar cane, tea, coffee, tobacco, spices, oil palm, cotton and rubber) (Masefield, 1972). Following independence (e.g., in Africa in the late 1950s and 1960s), the structures and methods left behind formed the basis of the R&D system of the new governments. The emphasis, especially in Africa, remained on cash crops (Roy, 1990). Although more attention was then paid to food-crop research in the subsistence livelihood context, there was little interaction with resource-poor farmers (Buhler et al., 2002).
The NAE strategy to ensure food sufficiency was reflected in the development of the Green Revolution for developing countries which started with Cooperative Wheat Production Program in 1944 to increase wheat yield in Mexico. This program involved the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. It involved breeding high yielding, disease resistant wheat varieties and combined them with the use of artificial fertilizers, irrigation and pesticides. As a result of the program Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. A similar approach was |