PUBLIC INVESTMENT IN AGRI-FOOD SYSTEM INNOVATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Highlights

● Global public and private agricultural R&D spending has increased since 2000.

● Agri-food R&D drives productivity growth, but underinvestment in R&D persists.

● Agri-food R&D will need to address objectives beyond productivity.

● R&D investment in climate adaptation alleviates the impacts of climate change.

● Greater cross-country coordination and integration of agri-food R&D is essential.

Abstract

Research is essential for improvement of agricultural productivity, resource use and resilience, and for food systems transformation more broadly. This article analyzes the drivers of past agricultural productivity growth in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and argues that productivity is not growing fast enough to meet the needs of a global population of 10 billion by 2050. A sustainable transformation of agri-food systems in LMICs will need greater and faster technical change. Higher investment in agri-food R&D is therefore needed to accelerate productivity growth and address the social, economic, nutritional and environmental challenges facing LMICs. Greater and better-targeted investment in sustainable technologies and climate change mitigation and adaptation will be particularly important to reducing the climate change impacts on agriculture and food security in the coming decades. However, LMICs with small research systems and limited innovation capacity lack the scale and resources to effectively tackle the challenges ahead. Better coordination and a clear articulation of roles and responsibilities among national, subregional, regional and global R&D actors (both from the public and private sectors) are essential to ensuring that scarce financial, human, and infrastructure resources are optimized, duplications minimized, and synergies and complementarities enhanced.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

agri-food system / innovation / R&D investment / productivity / climate change

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Compliance with ethics guidelines

Gert-Jan Stads, Alejandro Nin-Pratt, Keith Wiebe, Timothy B. Sulser, and Rui Benfica declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2023. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)