Agricultural Change and Its Drivers: A Regional Outlook | 135

     Many resource conserving technologies and production practices that are environment friendly are unused for want of enabling institutional and policy arrangements (Rhoades, 1999; SaciWATERs, 2002; Raina and Sangar, 2004). De­cisions made about the environment are also burdened by static assumptions and compartmentalized analyses. In a static sense, environmental regulations add to project cost. In a dynamic sense, if conventional waste products are re­used or captured within production systems, there are no additional costs for disposal (Porter and van der Linde, 1995) and total value of output is larger. In a production system that involves synergies, decision makers will have to look beyond the single output/end product to the range of joint outputs and their mutual dependencies. In such sys­tems, the increase in productivity can cover for the increased costs in utilizing waste products. Local value added in tea plantations can be much higher if the shade trees (e.g., silver oak) are replaced by arhar (red gram/pigeon pea), which has additional value. Local employment opportunities in rural areas are fairly high in environmental biotechnology, e.g., production of bioplastics from agricultural wastes. There is significant opportunity for industrial developments to incor­porate local value addition or processing activities, involv­ing a dynamic mutually beneficial environment-production relationship (Hatti-Kaul et al., 2007). These developments have major implications for multifunctional agricultural systems and AKST.
     AKST, being almost static, single commodity focused and weak in natural resource and social systems capacities, is not equipped in the near future to handle such multiple products/functions, synergies and dynamic systems. For in­stance in industrial agriculture (producing biofuel or bio­plastics) and the pharmaceutical livestock farms (producing specific drugs—as isolates or as part of animal products), the entire chain of activities and relationships of supplies, fi­nance, infrastructure, services, etc., required will need to be assessed not by an individual scientist or a research institute, but by a coalition of actors.
     A major message is that little is known about balancing the benefits and the pains of adjustment or change in farm­ing practices and policies that will be essential to reduce sensitivity of the sector to pollution. Even less is known to enable better linkages between agriculture and other sectors of the economy, where environment-friendly production practices and waste reduction or utilization become built-in synergies within the system.
     Overall, the commitment in ESAP to invest in local ca­pacities for development demands a convergence of poli­cies and programs in education and employment. ESAP will need skills and competencies as well as a diversified bas­ket of employment strategies designed to meet the needs of globally competitive producers and small-scale farmers and landless laborers. The region will also need knowledge and investment inputs to ensure that its tribal and indigenous knowledge systems are developed and utilized for environ­ment-friendly development. Most of all, education in gen­eral and AKST in particular, has to consciously acquire the disciplinary and social competencies that are necessary to understand the tradeoffs between economic growth and the environment.

 

4.2.6     Science and technology

4.2.6.1   Research investment
There is little information or projections available for future investments in agricultural research in the ESAP region. De­spite estimates of attractive rates of return to investments in agricultural research and several impact assessment stud­ies, there is little available on possible trends/estimates of potential agricultural research investment in future. The determinants of agricultural research investment, especially in the public sector, seem not to respond to any conven­tional economic arguments/findings and are influenced by a myriad of complex factors (Tabor, et al., 1998; World Bank, 2005). Rather, investments in agricultural R&D in the ESAP region seem to be arbitrary and entirely politi­cally driven or to follow a precedent approach at best, like any other public bureaucracy. "The sheer complexity of ag­ricultural development, especially the lack of obvious and standard approaches for investing in agriculture, has led to rather fickle support from international and national policy makers" (World Bank, 2005). Despite a recent resurgence in national/international policy realms and donor commit­ment to invest in agriculture, there is little attention being given to increasing investment in agricultural research.
     It was argued that as part of a wider global phenomenon, the ESAP region faces and will continue to face a relative de­cline in the amount of public funding available for agricul­tural research and extension (Anderson and Purcell, 1996). However, within the ESAP region the recent resurgence of public investment in agricultural research (accounting for 32.7% of global public agricultural research expenditures in 2000, compared to just 20% in 1981) is likely to con­tinue. In 2000 China and India together accounted for 31% of the public agricultural R&D investment in developing countries. They will contribute hugely to future public ag­ricultural R&D investment (Pardey et al., 2006). This revi-talization of public R&D investment in India and China is largely a result of government policies to revitalize public sector research and enable commercialization of agricultural technologies, especially increasing linkages with the private sector. The decline in Japan's public sector commitment to ag­ricultural R&D is more than compensated by its massive in­crease in the 1990s in private agricultural R&D investments, a trend that is likely to continue. Japan and Thailand will be the next large investors in domestic agricultural science.
     The developing countries will continue to expand their share in global public sector agricultural R&D investments. The ESAP region, mainly because of China and India, will have an increasing share of this developing country invest­ment in formal public sector AKST (Pardey et al., 2006). But the increasing share of the developing countries (from 45.4% in 1981 to 55.7% in 2000), may mean that in future the developing countries cannot rely on technological spill­over from the rich countries or international research com­munities. The S&T linkages between rich and poor countries will get more attenuated as the funding in developed coun­tries gets reoriented from agricultural productivity to en­vironmental impacts of agriculture, food quality, medical, energy and industrial applications of agriculture (Pardey et al., 2006). The productivity obsession to the neglect of other