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Legume seed systems in many developing countries are characterized by low availability of certified seeds because the private sector is often absent, and the public sector has limited capacity to produce such seeds. Farmer seed enterprises (FSEs) are therefore increasingly promoted as alternative suppliers of certified and in some instances, quality declared and truthfully labelled seeds. In this study, we assess the commercial viability of FSEs that produce chickpea and green gram certified seeds by comparing average seed production cost, inclusive of opportunity costs and expected profits, with consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) price. The cost of seed production data come from a survey of 63 FSEs and the data on WTP are from the Becker, DeGroot, Marschak (BDM) bidding experiments conducted with 512 farmers from the Central Dry Zone of Myanmar. We find that the post-harvest storage cost during the 7–8 months between harvest and the next planting season contributes significantly to the total cost of producing seeds. Forty-seven percent of chickpea farmers and 53% of green gram farmers were willing to pay equal to or higher than the average minimum cost of producing certified seeds. which is as an upper bound estimate of potential market share for FSEs’ certified seeds. This potential customer base of FSEs can be further increased by reducing the cost, especially post-harvest and labor costs. What role government, private companies, and NGOs could play in reducing the cost and increasing the demand for certified seed are important policy research questions discussed in the paper.

Planting quality seed is essential for increasing crop productivity. We study the potato seed market in Kenya and estimate farmers’ willingness to pay for certified, clean and ware potato seeds that use reputation and certification strategies at varying costs to provide quality signal. We find that farmers are prone to quality misperceptions and adjust their bids for high (low) quality seed upward (downward) in response to positive (negative) quality signals. Effective demand for quality seeds exceeds supply 286 per cent after correcting quality misperceptions. We make a strong case for the need of low-cost alternatives to meet this excess demand for quality seeds.

Seed systems for vegetatively propagated crops (VPCs) are frequently governed by regulatory blueprints designed for major cereal crops. This approach tends to disregard the distinct biological char...

Common bean is the most important legume crop for human consumption around the world. For this reason, bean breeders are challenged with increasing bean production while facing new problems like climate change. Guatemalan climbing beans have been suggested to represent a previously undefined race in the Middle American gene pool that may represent an untapped source of alleles for bean improvement that can contribute to solving production problems affecting both developed and developing countries. The genetic diversity, population structure, and genetic differentiation of two Guatemalan climbing bean collections were analyzed with ~ 45,000 SNPs markers and confirmed the existence of race Guatemala in the Middle American gene pool and its differentiation from other races. Further analysis using geospatial data, showed that elevation was an important factor when defining the population structure of race Guatemala beans.

African governments imposed mobility restrictions to suppress the spread of COVID-19. Many observers feared these measures would dramatically decrease incomes and increase food insecurity and anticipated that urban households would be much more impacted than rural ones. We use rural and urban survey data from 4000 households across five African countries to assess the pandemic's effect on incomes and food consumption. We find that a large share of the population saw incomes drop between March and July 2020. But these decreases were 43-63% smaller than predictions and early estimates, and highly correlated with the severity of restrictions. The income and food consumption impacts of the COVID-19 shock were widespread over both rural and urban areas. Policy making during a pandemic should recognize that restrictive measures will affect rural and urban, farming and non-farming, and richer and poorer households.

In many developing countries, smallholder farmers cultivating vegetatively propagated crops (VPCs) have limited access to quality planting material. This constraint can limit both the yield of and returns on VPC cultivation. Yet policy and regulatory initiatives designed to strengthen access to quality VPC planting materials have been relatively unsuccessful to date. Part of the problem is the unique biological and economic characteristics of vegetative propagation and its distinctness from cereal crops, which dominate narratives on seed system reforms. Drawing on qualitative analysis of policy and practice, this study examines reform options related to quality assurance regulations in four crop-country combinations: cassava in Nigeria and Vietnam, and potato in Kenya and Vietnam. The study highlights theory and evidence on existing models of regulation; alternative models that may better incentivize cost-effective multiplication and distribution; and recommendations for policy, regulation, and investment in VPC seed markets. Findings indicate that regulations designed around strict and centralized quality control systems tend to limit market size, while more localized production systems are limited by both capacity and reach. These findings suggest the need for alternatives that balance a permissive regulatory regime with decentralized production systems, grassroots capacity development, market surveillance, and systems that integrate internal (producer-level) quality assurance with external (regulatory) quality assurance.

This note summarizes perceptions of COVID-19 impacts and risks from a panel phone survey of rural households in eight districts in rural Malawi. While the results from the first round conducted in August 2020 were reported in a previous brief, this note will focus on the evolution of indicators from round 1 to round 2, conducted in November 2020. The sample comprises 833 households interviewed in both survey rounds. Two additional follow-up survey rounds are planned for 2021. The survey was originally designed to measure the seasonality of labor activities but was adjusted to assess COVID-19 impacts and perceptions in rural Malawi. Though initial concern of the impact of COVID-19 on Malawi was high at the start of the global pandemic, case numbers stayed relatively low through the end of 2020. Seven-day averages of 50-100 cases during the first survey round had dropped to under 5 in the fourth quarter of the year. Our analysis will examine how people’s perceptions evolved during this period of low infections.

The objective of this contribution is to report the initial impacts of measures taken to contain the COVID-19 pandemic on Myanmar's agri-food system. Myanmar is one of several late-transforming low-income countries in Southeast Asia where agriculture still plays a large role in rural livelihoods, and where food prices are a key factor affecting nutrition security for poor urban and rural households. Whereas the economic impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on tourism and manufacturing were obvious to policymakers, the impacts on the agri-food system were less evident and often more indirect. This resulted in the rural sector being allocated only a very small share of the government's initial fiscal response to mitigate the economic impacts of COVID-19. To correct this information gap, a suite of phone surveys covering a wide spectrum of actors in the agri-food system were deployed, including farm input suppliers, mechanization service providers, farmers, commodity traders, millers, food retailers and consumers. The surveys were repeated at regular intervals prior to and during the main crop production season which began shortly after nationwide COVID-19 prevention measures were implemented in April. While the results indicate considerable resilience in the agri-food system in response to the initial disruptions, persistent financial stress for a high proportion of households and agri-food system businesses indicate that the road to a full recovery will take time. The experience provides important lessons for strengthening the resilience of the agri-food system, and the livelihoods of households that depend on it.

Effective policy requires an accurate understanding of peoples’ livelihoods activities. The data for this evidence is often generated via lengthy surveys where designated respondents provide information about their household members. This burden on respondents may lead to both losses and biases as they grow fatigued during the interview. We test these hypotheses with an experiment in rural Ghana where we randomize individual household members’ position in the labor module. We find that moving a household member back by one position reduces their reported number of productive activities by 2.2% with average aggregate losses of 7.9%, or approximately one out of every twelve activities. Losses for women and youth are closer to one in nine. These biases result from both differential exposure to response fatigue (being positioned later in rosters) and differential vulnerability (greater impacts conditional on position). These results have important implications for data quality across many settings and topics.

Traditional family owned retail shops are the backbone of Myanmar’s consumer market. As the final node in the grocery supply chain, they sell all types of dry foods, i.e., processed and packaged, condiments, snacks, and beverages to final consumers. To some extent, they also supply basic staple grains, i.e., rice and pulses; dairy products; eggs; kitchen crops; and tobacco and alcohol. About 85 percent of all consumer goods in Myanmar are sold through these shops. In the food and grocery sector, these retail outlets, including wet markets, account for 90 percent of all sales, with the other 10 percent accounted for by fast-growing supermarkets. Because of the importance of traditional retail outlets in the last mile delivery of a wide variety of foods to consumers, any challenges they encounter from the COVID-19 crisis and corresponding policy responses to contain the virus have important implications for the availability and affordability of food for final consumers. This policy note is the first in a series of reports presenting results from rounds of a telephone survey of a sample of owners or managers of food retail shops located in the two largest cities in Myanmar, Yangon and Mandalay. The phone surveys are designed to provide a better understanding of the effects of COVID-19 shocks on Myanmar’s agri-food marketing system through the perspective of small-scale food retailers in urban areas. This policy note focuses on the demand side and overall business effects of the COVID-19 crisis on these food retailers. Phone interviews were conducted with 426 retail shop owners or managers between 8 and 15 July 2020. Eighty percent of those surveyed were in Yangon, with the rest in Mandalay.

Agricultural input retailers play a key role in Myanmar’s agri-food system by supplying farmers with fertilizer, seed, pesticides, and other inputs necessary for successful harvests. Because farm-level input use is an important driver of yields for all major food crops, shocks to the input retail sector have major implications for the welfare of rural households, as well as for their food security. This policy note presents results from round two of a five-round phone survey of agricultural input retailers. Our purpose is to provide data and insights to the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Irrigation (MOALI) and other agricultural sector stakeholders to assist them in better understanding COVID-19 related shocks to Myanmar’s agricultural input retailers. The round one results emphasized (i) widespread disruptions from the COVID-19 to both input supply and demand, (ii) higher transportation costs leading to higher input prices, and (iii) dramatically lower revenue expectations for retailers in 2020 compared to 2019.1 This note builds on the round one results by (i) exploring the effects of the COVID-19 crisis since the first-round interviews, (ii) tracking sales changes since the first round of the survey, and (iii) providing more detailed information on retailer credit and transportation.

Key Findings -A survey of 74 participants in national-level policy processes around agriculture, food security and nutrition issues in Senegal was implemented from December 2017 to March 2018 to examine the quality of these processes and the institutional architecture involved. -Overall, survey analyses show that stakeholder perceptions on two quality indices is quite positive. with an aggregate mean assessment score for index 1 (quality of policy processes) at 1.93 and for index 2 (quality of institutional architecture) at 2.3 (on a scale of 0-3). -Results indicate that, while some elements of the policy processes and institutional architecture are in place and people are quite positive about that, the country could benefit from further improvements.

Crop traders comprise the mid-stream of Myanmar’s food supply chain. They form important links between farms and food processors, exporters, and other downstream actors. Because they are close to the farmgate on the supply chain – many purchase agricultural commodities directly from farmers – any additional challenges to traders presented by the COVID-19 crisis and corresponding policy responses have important implications for the crop marketing channels farmers use and for the prices they receive for their crops. Further, challenges or changes to crop trading will have effects on the food system downstream and, ultimately, on consumers. Traders either carry out or facilitate the sales, transport, and purchases of raw agricultural commodities. Thus, they may be negatively affected by the travel and transport restrictions imposed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 as well as other policy measures that restrict exports or affect food retail channels to consumers. This research note seeks to help the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation (MOALI) of the Government of Myanmar and agricultural sector stakeholders understand the effects of recent COVID-19 shocks on Myanmar’s agri-food marketing system through the perspective of crop traders. We conducted a phone survey with 154 crop traders to understand the challenges of COVID-19 shocks to both their upstream and downstream operations, (ii) learn about adaptations and changes they are making in response to those challenges, and (iii) track recent (two weeks) and longer-term (last year) changes in the buying and selling prices of the commodities they trade.

Rapidly growing populations in sub-Saharan Africa have resulted in a focus by both policy-makers and researchers on understanding and creating employment opportunities for youth. While most attention has focused on jobs outside the agricultural sector, the persistent importance of agriculture in African economies means that the sector cannot be ignored when considering new employment opportunities. A large portion of existing work has made use of Living Standard Measurement Surveys (LSMS) and oth-ers of similar structure and design to describe employment patterns, by focusing on the distinction be-tween on- and off-farm labor, and household enterprises versus hired or wage labor.

Agricultural input retailers play a key role in Myanmar’s agri-food system by supplying farmers with fertilizer, seed, pesticides, and other inputs necessary for successful harvests. Because farm-level input use is an important driver of yields for all major food crops, shocks from the COVID-19 crisis to the input retail sector have major implications for rural household welfare as well as food security. In this policy note, we present results and analysis on the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on agricultural input retailers from a five-round telephone panel survey of between 150 and 200 retailers in Shan, Kachin, Bago, Ayeyarwady, Sagaing, and Mandalay that was implemented every two weeks from mid-May to late July 2020. 1 The objective of this survey was to provide data and insights to the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Irrigation (MOALI) and agricultural sector stakeholders so that they better understand the nature of COVID-19 related shocks to Myanmar’s agricultural input retailers. Previous policy notes2 mostly focused on the survey rounds individually, tracking the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on agricultural input retailers as they were happening. In this note, we take a more comprehensive approach by looking back over all five survey rounds to understand how the effects of the COVID-19 crisis evolved over time. In particular, this note presents results from May 2020 through July 2020 across the five survey rounds on (i) disruptions caused by the COVID-19 crisis, (ii) responses to these disruptions, (iii) sales of fertilizer, maize seed, vegetable seed, and pesticides, and (iv) input retailers’ employees and hired labor.

Encouraging the widespread adoption and use of new on-farm technologies is an important part of productivity-led strategies to promote agricultural transformation. While many interventions have been designed to promote adoption through extension and education, little is known about how these efforts influence farmer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for new technologies. We use a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism to elicit farmer WTP for two improved seed varieties and a new seed treatment product, Apron Star, under two different lead-farmer extension treatments in Tanzania: (i) a demonstration plot showcasing the technologies within a village; and (ii) a demonstration plot coupled with distribution of trial packs enabling some farmers to test the technologies on their own land. In the BDM, farmers were presented with six products – the two bean varieties: without Apron Star, with Apron Star already applied, and with a sachet of Apron Star for the farmer to treat the seed him/herself. Our results suggest that neither extension treatment significantly affects WTP for these technologies. However, we find that farmers are willing to pay more for seed that is pre-treated with Apron Star than for seed bundled with a sachet of Apron Star for self-treatment.

This article introduces a special section on impact assessment of agricultural research, institutional innovation and technology adoption. It is based on papers presented at a pre-conference workshop held at the International Conference of Agricultural Economists at Foz do Iguacu, Brazil in August 2012. It briefly reviews the history of impact assessment of agricultural research and discusses the contributions made by each of the papers included in this section towards advancing the theory and practice of assessing the outcomes and impacts of agricultural research for development.

New estimates of the impacts of germplasm improvement in the major staple crops between 1965 and 2004 on global land-cover change are presented, based on simulations carried out using a global economic model (Global Trade Analysis Project Agro-Ecological Zone), a multicommodity, multiregional computable general equilibrium model linked to a global spatially explicit database on land use. We estimate the impact of removing the gains in cereal productivity attributed to the widespread adoption of improved varieties in developing countries. Here, several different effects—higher yields, lower prices, higher land rents, and trade effects—have been incorporated in a single model of the impact of Green Revolution research (and subsequent advances in yields from crop germplasm improvement) on land-cover change. Our results generally support the Borlaug hypothesis that increases in cereal yields as a result of widespread adoption of improved crop germplasm have saved natural ecosystems from being converted to agriculture. However, this relationship is complex, and the net effect is of a much smaller magnitude than Borlaug proposed. We estimate that the total crop area in 2004 would have been between 17.9 and 26.7 million hectares larger in a world that had not benefited from crop germplasm improvement since 1965. Of these hectares, 12.0–17.7 million would have been in developing countries, displacing pastures and resulting in an estimated 2 million hectares of additional deforestation. However, the negative impacts of higher food prices on poverty and hunger under this scenario would likely have dwarfed the welfare effects of agricultural expansion.

Underinvestment in agricultural research remains rife across Southeast Asia, despite the remaining importance of the subregion’s agricultural sector and ample evidence of agricultural technology impact to date. To help identify specific areas where additional investment is most needed, this study compares the impact potential for the poor of alternative agricultural research foci, taking changes in production patterns, consumption patterns and environmental sustainability into account. New spatial data on the distribution of poverty and the expenditure patterns of households below international poverty lines are used to offer more detailed assessment of the poverty relevance of alternative foci than possible previously. Patterns of impact potential are evaluated against evidence of impact to date to discern probabilities of success in achieving potential impacts. Impact patterns discerned are contrasted with current relative funding allocations across research areas in the subregion by National Agricultural Research Systems (NARSs) and International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs) to identify key funding gaps. Research on rice, vegetables, fruit and aquaculture is identified as having the largest gap between current investments and expected impacts. The rice research gap is the most pronounced, as it is the single source of a substantial share of quantified potential future benefits for the poor, has positive expected environmental benefits, and has a strong record of documented impact to date in the subregion. Vegetables, fruit and aquaculture appear to have greater relative impact potential for the poor and nutritional benefits than their funding shares, but the track record of impact to date is more limited and the likelihood of success for such investments is more uncertain.

Based on a comprehensive search and review of the literature, 42 studies are identified for in-depth review and analysis of documented impacts of agricultural research from 1959 to 2009. This body of evidence is subjected to a systematic, quantitative scrutiny for the coverage and type of impact to derive patterns, gaps and trends in documented impacts of research in the subregion. The analysis offers compelling evidence that past investments in agricultural research in the region have been productive. In so doing, the study also reveals some persistent patterns and identifies a number of gaps between investments and documented impacts. Strikingly, the benefits are principally derived from rice improvement research, which has generated 86% of total documented benefits in the Southeast Asia region over the past five decades. In comparison with rice improvement research, evidence of impacts in other areas such as natural resource management and other commodities is minor. This suggests that there is considerably more certainty about the ability of rice research, particularly genetic improvement, to generate impact than is the case for other research foci. However, even for rice, the evidence has been patchy across time and space. There has been no comprehensive and subregion-wide attempt to inventory trends in adoption of improved rice varieties and document historical net benefits generated by this research effort. Despite the large-scale, long-term and sustained adoption of research generated rice technologies for smallholder farmers in this subregion, an impressive story on the impacts of agricultural research on long-term developmental goals still remains undocumented. The paper also reveals a declining trend in total documented net benefits from agricultural research in recent years, which is probably attributable to research lag times and changes in the intensity of impact assessment over time.

Investments in agricultural research by national and international organizations have successfully generated improvements in the economic well-being of people, well quantified in a wide range of ex-post impact assessment studies. In contrast, relatively little attention has been given to quantifying the impacts of research on the environment. This gap in understanding the full range of impacts arising from agricultural research presents an important challenge. Growing scientific and public recognition of the significance of environmental impacts of agricultural research, both positive and negative, necessitates their integration into the research evaluation process. This article provides a broad overview of some of the conceptual issues and empirical challenges inherent in measuring and documenting environmental impacts resulting from changes in agricultural practices, reviews some recent environmental impact assessment case studies, and discusses the lessons yielded by those case studies. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.

This article illustrates a methodology for assessing economic returns to a publicly funded breeding program in the presence of private sector investments, and spill-ins from other contemporary public institutions and past research efforts. The approach consists of determining yield gains from bean improvement research; applying these yield gain estimates to measure benefits attributable to different institutional players and time periods; and then assessing the benefit-cost ratios of investments in a bean improvement program since 1980 by Michigan State University (MSU). The results indicate that investments in MSU's bean breeding program have yielded benefits to costs ratio in the range of 0.7 to 2.2, depending on the attribution rule used to estimate the benefits. The estimated benefit/cost ratios reported in this study are lower-bound estimates, as they do not account for potential benefits from area planted to MSU varieties outside of Michigan (spillover effects), which was 1.5 times greater than the area planted to MSU-bred varieties within Michigan in the period 1998–2002. The implications of the increasingly privatized bean seed markets for the role of public sector research in bean improvement research are discussed.

This study offers a “best evidence” approach to summarizing recent benefit-cost analyses of international agricultural research in Africa. First, from an extensive literature review and the resulting global inventory of impact studies, 23 studies are identified that calculate aggregate rates of return for Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and partner investments in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). These studies are then appraised against a review framework consisting of principles, criteria, and indicators for study rigor. Subsequently, the economic benefits reported by studies grouped on the basis of its analytical rigor are aggregated and set against total investment by the CGIAR and national agricultural research systems to determine if the total investment to date can be justified by documented benefits under a range of assumptions. As a result, the study finds that aggregate investment is justified under a fairly wide range of suppositions. Under all scenarios, the vast majority of documented benefits stem from a relatively limited array of activities with a majority of benefits stemming from biological control (80%). Close to 20% of total benefits result from crop genetic improvement, and less than 1% result from all other activities. The implications of these results for research investment strategies in SSA and impact assessment are discussed.

This paper deals with conceptual and methodological issues arising in ex post environmental impact assessment of agricultural research. It presents a case study of approaches used (and not used) and challenges associated with the ex post assessment of environmental impacts of research supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The paper illustrates the difficulty of tracking the global effects of agricultural research on natural resources due to a diffused and complex set of decision variables effecting intensification and expansion of land in agriculture, primarily in developing countries. The central point in ex post impact assessment concerns costs and benefits (in terms of relevant budget constraints and time frame for decision) of in-depth empirical versus qualitative analysis. Within this context we conclude that the empirical counterfactual approach ("with" and "without" research) is not an option. As a second best alternative, it is inferred from cases and global statistics that: in specific instances the introduction of high yielding varieties did have unintended impacts on natural resources, in part due to policy distortion and in part due to unforeseen chain reactions in the ecosystems. But on net balance, increased yields attributable to international agricultural research have had positive environmental impacts in the form of net land saving.

Background Accurate identification of crop cultivars is crucial in assessing the impact of crop improvement research outputs. Two commonly used identification approaches, elicitation of variety names from farmer interviews and morphological plant descriptors, have inherent uncertainty levels. Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) was used in a case study as an alternative method to track released varieties in farmers’ fields, using cassava, a clonally propagated root crop widely grown in the tropics, and often disseminated through extension services and informal seed systems. A total of 917 accessions collected from 495 farming households across Ghana were genotyped at 56,489 SNP loci along with a “reference library” of 64 accessions of released varieties and popular landraces. Results Accurate cultivar identification and ancestry estimation was accomplished through two complementary clustering methods: (i) distance-based hierarchical clustering; and (ii) model-based maximum likelihood admixture analysis. Subsequently, 30 % of the identified accessions from farmers’ fields were matched to specific released varieties represented in the reference library. ADMIXTURE analysis revealed that the optimum number of major varieties was 11 and matched the hierarchical clustering results. The majority of the accessions (69 %) belonged purely to one of the 11 groups, while the remaining accessions showed two or more ancestries. Further analysis using subsets of SNP markers reproduced results obtained from the full-set of markers, suggesting that GBS can be done at higher DNA multiplexing, thereby reducing the costs of variety fingerprinting. A large proportion of discrepancy between genetically unique cultivars as identified by markers and variety names as elicited from farmers were observed. Clustering results from ADMIXTURE analysis was validated using the assumption-free Discriminant Analysis of Principal Components (DAPC) method. Conclusion We show that genome-wide SNP markers from increasingly affordable GBS methods coupled with complementary cluster analysis is a powerful tool for fine-scale population structure analysis and variety identification. Moreover, the ancestry estimation provides a framework for quantifying the contribution of exotic germplasm or older improved varieties to the genetic background of contemporary improved cultivars. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12863-015-0273-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The paper reviews and summarizes evidences of impacts of crop improvement research of major food crops in Africa. It provides evidence of increased availability of improved varieties of major food crops to farmers in Africa, increased food production in regions where adoption has occurred, and positive returns to research investment, indicating that agricultural research in Africa has had productivity increasing impacts on its agriculture. However, research impacts vary considerably across countries and regions within a country as a result of agroclimatic factors and policy environment, which affects the supply of seeds and other inputs, and the continuity and stability of research investments. The paper points to a number of important issues, both internal and external to the agricultural research system organization that need to be addressed if agricultural research is to provide a stimulus for modernizing African agriculture. Given the small size of food crop production area in many African countries, it is important for research systems to take full advantage of research spill-ins from regional and international research organizations. There is a great potential to increase the efficiency of research systems by improving the coordination among members of national research systems and continuing improvements in collaborations between NARSs and regional and international organizations.

An econometric approach using international and national yield trial data is employed to estimate a spillover matrix for wheat varietal technology. The global spillover matrix is estimated based on international yield trial data from 1979–1980 to 1987–1988, that include 195 international trial locations and 209 wheat varieties. The locations were classified across countries using the CIMMYT's wheat megaenvironment system and varieties were classified by both their environmental and institutional origin. The model gave good explanatory power and confirmed the location specificity hypothesis, at least, for the varieties developed by national programs (NARS). The spillover matrix shows that NARS varieties developed in the ‘home’ environment generally perform better on average than varieties developed in other megaenvironments. Also, the matrix is not symmetric. CIMMYT varieties perform better on average in irrigated and high rainfall environments than NARS varieties developed for these environments. The yield advantage of CIMMYT varieties in many test megaenvironments indicates the potential of CIMMYT varieties to spill-over to these test megaenvironments. Results also indicate that national programs are efficient in selecting from among imported technologies. Analysis of international data is complemented by the analysis of country-level data for Pakistan and Kenya that confirms the above results. The country-level analysis, however, indicates that CIMMYT germplasm does not do so well in some sub-environments, such as the irrigated short-duration environment. The results of the spillover matrix have implications for the design of crop breeding programs both at the national and international levels. Information provided by the spillover matrix can be utilized by national programs to deploy their resources more efficiently by following a mixed strategy of direct importation of technology in some environments and local development of technologies in other environments which are unique to the country.

Currently, 1,150 scientists are carrying out wheat improvement research in developing countries with an annual budget of around $100 million. Because of the recent reduction in agricultural research budgets, this study marshalls evidence from 71 wheat research programs in 35 developing countries to address the following puzzle: what is the optimal size, type and location of wheat research programs in the developing world? The analysis reveals that if research spillins are taken into consideration, almost half of the wheat improvement programs in developing countries are inefficient. The efficiency of wheat research in many National Agricultural Research Systems can be increased by reducing the size of research programs, consolidating state and federal research programs, and shifting from wheat-breeding research to capturing spillins from other countries and from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).