Leveraging funding. The profile of agriculture can be raised through its links with health, nutrition, and environmental goals. For example, NEPAD’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) was endorsed by the African Heads of States and Government Summit as a framework for restoring agriculture growth, food security and rural development in Africa. CAADP has been receiving substantial support since agriculture was placed at the top of Africa’s development agenda through the Maputo Declaration, which commits governments to allocate 10% of public investment for agricultural development (Heidhues
et al., 2004).

There is potential for leveraging funding for agriculture by highlighting (and preferably quantifying) the potential positive contribution of agriculture to health, nutrition and the environment. For example, health considerations typically play little if any role in the decisions made in ministries of agriculture, despite the large potential health benefits from joint research and action in agriculture and health (Hawkes and Ruel, 2006). Similarly, health and agriculture are rarely considered interdependent by donor agencies or even government departments when budgets and strategies are being determined. In Malawi, over half of child mortality can be attributed to malnutrition, as much as the combined socalled killer diseases (Rothschild, 2005). There is therefore
scope for arguing that part of the health budget would be well spent reducing child mortality through improvements in agriculture. In Uganda, collaboration between UK DFID economics and environment advisers resulted in the integration of environmental issues into both policy and investment mechanisms of the Plan for the Modernisation of Agriculture (Yaron and White, 2002).

Without increased awareness and cooperation among agriculture and health ministries, AKST is likely to continue to focus on increased output rather than nutritional quality and diversity. The CGIAR centers have recently begun an initiative on agriculture and health that could potentially contribute to increased coordination between ministries of health and agriculture and among countries in the region. Networking national bodies with regional bodies such as NEPAD and international organizations such as FAO and WHO, also offers potential.

 Networks have the potential to use scarce funding and expertise more effectively and can address some shortcomings, such as low funding and fragmented agricultural research capacity. Despite increases in AKST capacity in the 1970s and 1980s, more than half the region’s countries each employ fewer than 100 full-time equivalent researchers, and 40% of total capacity lies within just five countries. Increased reliance on networks brings with problems of complexity that can negate benefits and SSA’s ability to benefit from network synergies is likely to be constrained by the current lack of sufficient capacity. The question of whether or not the benefits of regional cooperation and integration outweigh the costs has not been evaluated sufficiently (Toure, 2003). The increased use of networks for AKST research and development is particularly challenging given an emphasis on farmer participation, particularly in areas where research is becoming more site specific (Burley, 1987).

The involvement of the private sector. Globally, there has been a gradual shift away from government and donor funding, a trend which is likely to continue. Although in the short and medium term, private sector investments in AKST are likely to remain small in SSA (currently less than 2% of research spending) due in part to the lack of funding incentives (Beintema and Stads, 2006), funding mechanisms that are likely to increase in importance include commodity levies, internally generated resources, local government funding and commercial contracts (IAC, 2004).

Significant debates remain over the role and involvement of the private sector in AKST research and development. A continuing question is whether countries in SSA should rely exclusively on approaches by established science centers of excellence, or involve the private sector in public-private partnerships. Private sector R&D has tended to focus on improving crops and technologies relevant to farmers in richer countries, ignoring crops important to poor farmers because of the lower profit potential of the latter. Private public partnerships offer the possibility of a focus on poorer farmers combined with access to the better equipment and facilities that private companies often have (IFPRI, 2005). However, such approaches could draw public funds away from R&D relevant to poor farmers toward high-return commercial crops. Findings from Latin America suggest that partnerships work best when the parties have a shared goal or interest in a particular outcome and the benefits of working together outweigh the costs of conducting the research separately (Hartwich et al., 2007). These partnerships raise critical issues concerning intellectual property rights. For example:

“To develop golden rice . . . Potrykus and Beyer used proprietary technologies belonging to half a dozen different companies. . . . After the initial research the first step was to arrange for free licenses for these technologies so that Potrykus and Beyer could use them to further develop golden rice varieties. Syngenta then made legal arrangements giving the intellectual property rights associated with golden rice to a group called the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, chaired by Potrykus and made up of individuals from various public and private organizations. The Humanitarian Board grants royalty-free sublicenses to the golden rice technology to public research institutions so they can develop locally adapted varieties in places like Bangladesh, China, India, and the Philippines. For developing country farmers who generate more than US$10,000 a year from farming, a commercial license from Syngenta is required. Otherwise, the technology is free for use by farmers in developing countries. Working out such an arrangement took considerable time” (IFPRI, 2005).

5.2 Generation, Access and Application of AKST

5.2.1 Appropriate technologies
Globally, large productivity gains in agriculture have been
achieved through monocropping systems that benefit from
specialization and economies of scale. In SSA, given that