Photograph showing Hand pollination of rice in the greenhouse

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Data collection procedures and methodology

The ASTI initiative involves a large amount of original and ongoing survey work focused on low- and middle-income countries, but it also maintains access to relevant S&T data for high-income countries collected by other agencies. For each country in which ASTI is active, the research team typically works with the national agricultural research institute, which coordinates the in-country survey round and coauthors and co-publishes the resulting country briefs, reports, and fact sheets with IFPRI. These surveys focus on research agencies, not research programs.

The datasets are processed using internationally accepted statistical procedures and definitions developed by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for compiling R&D statistics.* Agricultural R&D investments are measured on a performer basis. Estimates were grouped into four major institutional categories: government agencies, higher education agencies, nonprofit institutions, and business enterprises. Public agricultural research is defined to include government agencies, higher education agencies, and nonprofit institutions, thereby excluding private enterprises. Government agencies are directly administered by the national government and are typically departments or institutes within a certain ministry. Nonprofit institutions, on the other hand, are not directly controlled by the national government and have no explicit profit-making objective. These agencies are often linked to producer organizations or commodity boards. Higher education agencies are academic agencies that combine university-level education with research. They include agricultural faculties, as well as specialized R&D institutes under universities. Private-sector agencies are agencies whose primary activity is the production of goods and services for profit. Some of these companies have an R&D unit dedicated to agricultural research, but R&D is generally not their main activity. Agricultural research activities undertaken by international organizations are explicitly excluded from the dataset and are reported separately.

Agricultural research, as defined here, includes research on crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries, natural resources, the use of agricultural inputs, and the socioeconomic aspects of primary agricultural production. Also included is research concerning the onfarm storage and processing of agricultural products, commonly referred to as postharvest or food-processing research. Not included in the current data compilation are research activities in support of agrochemical, agricultural machinery, or food processing industries (which are better reported under those industries), as well as the more basic and discipline-oriented research activities undertaken by departments such as microbiology and zoology. Strict delineations, however, have not always been possible.

A complete list of agencies involved in agricultural R&D is identified at the onset of the survey, and each agency is approached to participate. To this end, three different survey forms were developed: one for government agencies and nonprofit institutions, one for faculties and schools, and one for the private sector. All forms had different sets of questions, and those for government agencies and nonprofit institutions requested the most detail. In general the forms consists of four sections:

  • Institutional details, such as address, affiliation, organizational structure (including number of research stations), institutional history, and so on;
  • Human resource information, such as number of researchers by degree level, head count and full-time equivalents (that is, staffing adjusted for time spent on research), share of female researchers, and support staff by various categories;
  • Financial resources, such as expenditures by cost category and funding source; and
  • Research focus by commodity (about 35–40 items) and by theme (about 20 items).

Time series data are collected for the main indicators (research investments, research funding sources, and research staff totals); the remaining indicators are mostly for a particular benchmark year. Additional qualitative information is being collected through country visits involving in-depth meetings with various agencies, given that quantitative information often doesn’t provide the full picture of developments in agricultural R&D resources.

* OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). 2002. Frascati manual: Proposed standard practice for surveys on research and experimental development. Paris. [add link from OECD site] UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), Division of Statistics on Science and Technology. 1984. Manual for statistics on scientific and technological activities. Paris.