Feeding the world's growing population is a critical policy challenge
for the twenty-first century. With constraints on water, arable land,
and other natural resources, agricultural innovation is a promising path
to meeting the nutrient needs for future generations. At the same time,
potential increases in the variability of the world's climate may
intensify the need for developing new crops that can tolerate extreme
weather. Despite the key role for scientific breakthroughs, there is an
active discussion on the returns to public and private spending in
agricultural R&D, and many of the world's wealthier countries have
scaled back the share of GDP that they devote to agricultural R&D.
Dwindling public support leaves universities, which historically have
been a major source of agricultural innovation, increasingly dependent
on industry funding, with uncertain effects on the nature and direction
of agricultural research. All of these factors create an urgent need for
systematic empirical evidence on the forces that drive research and
innovation in agriculture. This book aims to provide such evidence
through economic analyses of the sources of agricultural innovation, the
challenges of measuring agricultural productivity, the role of
universities and their interactions with industry, and emerging
mechanisms that can fund agricultural R&D.
