concepts, absolute and relative poverty. Absolute poverty is a measure of how many people lie below a certain income threshold; relative poverty measures the degree of income inequality. Studies that show positive effects of agricultural R&D on poverty alleviation may implicitly be considering absolute poverty; studies that indicate negative effects may be more likely to refer to relative poverty (Foster, 1998).
         There are three sets of factors which further conflate attempts to analyze the impact of AKST on poverty reduc­tion. First, what is the role of underlying socioeconomic conditions in determining the benefits/costs of AKST? It is easy to find cases in which poor farmers with small land holdings have benefited as much as large-scale farmers, and those in which the benefits of new technology were confined to wealthy, more commercialized farms only. Which out­come predominates depends primarily on the underlying so­cioeconomic conditions of a particular case rather than the characteristics of the technology per se (Kerr and Kolavalli, 1999). Second, what is the role of the underlying social and

political institutions? A review of the impacts of agricul­tural research on the poor (Kerr and Kolavalli, 1999) shows that it is difficult to make generalizations about the impacts of agricultural research on the poor and the distribution of benefits depends on the underlying social and political insti­tutions rather than technology per se. Effects of improved technology on income distribution across farms with dif­ferent resource endowments have been ambiguous. About 80% of a review of 324 papers on the distributional impacts of the green revolution argued that inequity worsened, but there were significant variations within the data set (Free-bairn, 1995). Innovations in agricultural research will not reduce poverty in the absence of poverty-focused policy and action (Gunasena, 2003). Third, in the absence of specific data on the impacts of AKST on poverty alleviation, one cannot simply use economic growth nor yield increases as a proxy for poverty reduction. The effect of agricultural re­search on poverty is usually linked in the literature through its effects on agricultural productivity (Kerr and Kolavalli,