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Downloading a Dream
In today’s climate of tight funding for agricultural research and development (R&D), policymakers and research managers want to know more about the potential best bets for their research dollars. As part of its program of research on Agricultural Science and Technology Policy, IFPRI has developed a computer software package called DREAM (for Dynamic Research EvaluAtion for Management) that is able to evaluate the economic effects of agricultural R&D under a broad range of conditions. Since April 1999 DREAM has been available on IFPRI’s web site: the whole package can be downloaded with an accompanying manual in English or Spanish. So far, the current version of the package, which was developed in Latin America by Stanley Wood of IFPRI and Wilfred Baitx, formerly of Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT) in Colombia, has been downloaded by 70 analysts and researchers. Although the program is now up and running, the research team continues to extend and refine it. They have already updated the program three times and plan a major new release by the end of 1999.
What Does Dream Do?
Say, a publicly funded research center in country “x” is weighing whether it should work to develop an integrated pest management approach to controlling the inroads of a certain insect on pinto beans. Or should it develop a new, highly productive variety of maize? Research dollars are in short supply, so the country cannot do both. Enter DREAM. The menu-driven software allows the research
analyst to enter data—compiled through consultation with scientists, extension workers, economists, and others—on the market and technology factors that influence the likely impact of a new technology. This includes factors such as production, consumption, prices, government interventions, agroecological grouping of the land where the crops are grown, and estimated patterns of adoption, to simulate the possible benefits and compare them to the costs of proposed R&D. Much of these data can be linked to maps via geographic information systems (GIS).
Computer software package DREAM simulates the possible benefits of proposed R&D and compares them to the costs. |
DREAM estimates the economic benefits of R&D by simulating and comparing the outlook with and without the projected new research. The package can model the impacts of R&D in both single and multiple markets or countries. And the model takes research “spillovers” into account . . . it considers the possibility of adapting and locally using technologies developed elsewhere. It can show the likely economic effects (in terms of changes in quantities produced or consumed or traded, changes in prices, and the benefits to producers and consumers) for the country or region as a whole and also indicate the areas and social groups within the country that will benefit, or perhaps lose, as a result of the research.
DREAM doesn’t just help analysts assess the potential benefits of investments yet to be made. In a case in which DREAM was used to investigate the impacts of past research investment, data on new varieties of rice in Latin America were analyzed using DREAM. In the aggregate, the rice research proved phenomenally successful, increasing rice farmers’ revenues overall and saving consumers millions of dollars because it increased productivity so much that rice prices fell. But most of the new varieties only grew well under irrigation: farmers with irrigated land benefited mightily, but generally poor, unmechanized farmers using rainfed varieties lost out. Not only were many of the new varieties not suitable for them, but the drop in the rice price hit them as well. If the purpose of the research was to benefit the poor farmers, perhaps the money could have been better spent in other ways. On the other hand, with the overall benefits from R&D as large as they were, countries could look for other policy and investment options to help the impoverished upland farmers. These are the kinds of trade-offs that DREAM can highlight.
IFPRI is using the DREAM program extensively in its work in Latin America, where the Institute is conducting a comprehensive survey of agricultural R&D investment and impact throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, in collaboration with a number of institutions, particularly the InterAmerican Development Bank and CIAT. In a typical application involving a series of meetings, representatives of the Andean countries of Latin America met, and each country presented its agricultural R&D priorities. Several research themes were chosen that appeared on the priority list of more than one country. DREAM simulations were then able to show the relative economic benefits of the various research themes within each country and for the region as a whole, and GIS mapping techniques were then used to map the specific areas of the region that could benefit from particular R&D activities. Given its international focus, IFPRI’s own DREAM application emphasizes R&D evaluation at a strategic level, trying to identify the particular programs of research most appropriate across groups of countries.
How Did Dream Evolve?
Efforts to quantify the impact of spending on R&D date back to the 1940s. These efforts linked productivity growth with technical change and technical change with agricultural research. In the 1980s the search for ways to evaluate research and to set priorities intensified as resources for R&D became scarcer. A comprehensive review of research evaluation methods was set forth in a 1995 book by Alston, Norton, and Pardey, Science under Scarcity, published by Cornell University Press in cooperation with the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR) and reprinted in a paperback version in 1998 by CAB International (order through www.cabi.org/catalog/books/sciscarc.htm). The book included the initial formal description of the DREAM model that eventually led to the software. One of the authors of the book, Philip Pardey, who leads IFPRI’s work on agricultural science and technology policy, notes that DREAM simplifies the tasks of analyzing R&D impacts, allowing more time to be invested in data gathering and interpretation of the results.
Because of the complexity of the issues involved, it is important that those who use the DREAM package know how to formulate scenarios, assemble and input data, and understand the outputs. To that end, IFPRI, in collaboration with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA) has held several series of workshops in Latin America in which research analysts applied DREAM to their own problems, and several Latin American institutions are now funding their own advanced training workshops.
DREAM is not the only impact assessment model available, of course. But Pardey and Wood believe it is the most powerful and flexible of currently available models, particularly for addressing agricultural research policy issues involving multiple agroecological and market regions. In line with its mandate to help developing countries formulate the best policies that benefit the poor, IFPRI chose to make the program downloadable from IFPRI’s web site at no charge.
Where Will It Go from Here?
While IFPRI continues to extend and refine DREAM in its own work, requests continue to flow in from other international agencies who want to explore the use of DREAM in their impact assessment procedures. One of these is the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, which supports agricultural R&D in many Asian and Pacific countries. Another is Brazil. In Africa, the U.S. Agency for International Development, in cooperation with the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA), is considering the use of DREAM to simulate the effectiveness of various agricultural R&D policies of national and regional significance.
As the need for structured, quantitative methods of evaluating and prioritizing research spending grows, models such as DREAM are becoming indispensible tools by which to inform complex policy problems.
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