Photograph showing Hand pollination of rice in the greenhouse

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History of collecting agricultural R&D indicators

The CGIAR, almost exclusively through the work of the International Food Policy Research Insitute (IFPRI) and the formerly International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR), has been the principal source of internationally comparable data and policy analyses on agricultural research systems for nearly two decades. The collaboration between the two CG agencies was initiated 1981 with the joint publication that drew together the best available numbers from secondary sources for an ad-hoc group of national agricultural research systems. Beginning in 1984, ISNAR initiated an Indicator Series Project that surveyed all the developing-countries and combined this new information with data from a comprehensive survey of secondary sources to compile a fully sourced, 154 country sample of research investment indicators for the period 1961 to 1985. A substantial effort went towards ensuring the coverage and treatment of these data was consistent over time and among countries.

A second round of data collection, implemented jointly by IFPRI and ISNAR, delves below national aggregate statistics to compile institution-specific data on R&D expenditures, staffing, research orientation, and so on. The scope of the survey was broadened to include agricultural R&D activities by universities and, in more recent work, by private firms as well. As a result the institutional coverage of the database was significantly enhanced and the comparability of the data among countries and over time markedly improved. Given resource limitations, the project phased the survey work on a region-by-region basis, beginning with sub-Saharan Africa (carried out during 1993-96), then the OECD countries (1996-97), and currently Latin America and the Caribbean (1997-2000).

Since 2001, the focus has been mainly on developing and maintaining its website; building a network of collaborators; initiate institutional survey rounds in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Middle East and North Africa region; and the development of a set of country briefs and regional synthesis reports that quantify, analyze, and discuss the major investment and institutional trends in these regions. During 2007-08, the ASTI team focused on updating the existing dataset for Latin America and the Caribbean. The initiative also implemented a benchmarking study to collect in-depth gender-disaggregated capacity indicators for a selected sub-Saharan African countries.