International research on vegetable improvement in East and Southern Africa: adoption, impact, and returns

Abstract

There is a lack of evidence for impact at scale of vegetable research and development, although the importance of vegetables for human nutrition and smallholder incomes is generally understood. We therefore study adoption and impact of improved tomato and African eggplant varieties developed through international agricultural research, released by national agricultural research and extension systems, and supplied to farmers by private seed companies in East and Southern Africa from 1990 to 2014. The study finds that in 2014, varieties developed by the World Vegetable Center accounted for 50% of tomato and 98% of African eggplant commercial seed production in East and Southern Africa. For Tanzania alone, investment in crop improvement generated economic gains of US$ 255 million for tomato and US$ 5 million for African eggplant up to 2014. The internal rate of return is 26% for tomato and 12% for African eggplant, though we project the latter to increase to 26% by 2024 as the variety was released only in 2007. These findings support the view that agricultural policy and investment reoriented towards contemporary nutritional challenges will give high returns to investment.

Decision-Making to Diversify Farm Systems for Climate Change Adaptation

“…Example 9: An example of these agricultural innovation systems are consortia of research institutes and seed companies, which provide farmers with affordable seeds of improved vegetable lines and as a conduit for feedback between seed suppliers and farmers (Schreinemachers et al, 2017b;Ochieng et al, 2019).…”

Nutrition-Sensitive Value Chain Development in a Changing Climate

“…It is critical that loss at the farm level is reduced by developing nutritious, resilient crop varieties that can tolerate climate variability. For example, researchers at the World Vegetable Center evaluated heat-tolerant and disease-resistant tomato varieties in Tanzania and found the rate of return to seed improvement to be as high as that reported for some staple crops (Schreinemachers et al 2017). In the same region, access to improved pigeonpea varieties also increased income returns for farmers (Shiferaw et al 2008).…”

Value-Ag: An integrated model for rapid ex-ante impact evaluation of agricultural innovations in smallholder systems

“…Smallholder farmers play a key role in achieving food security by producing around 80% of food in Asia and Africa (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2012) but are faced with low productivity, land degradation, rising production costs and/or labour shortages (World Bank, 2018). Decades of research, policy interventions and development projects have attempted to address these challenges through the promotion of new technologies or practice changes at the farm level in an attempt to increase yields, income, efficiency, resilience and/or food security in smallholder farms (Dixon et al, 2010;Schreinemachers et al, 2017;Sheahan and Barrett, 2017). But despite the potential benefits, many of the innovations have failed to achieve the desired level of adoption by farmers and local communities, meaning that smallholder farmers may have not benefitted as much as they could have in many regions (e.g.…”

“…Attempts to combine economic simulation and adoption projections in the evaluation of innovation opportunities have been made (Mwinuka et al, 2017;Schreinemachers et al, 2017), which suggests that multi-tool approaches are starting to pave the way for more realistic evaluations of changes at the farm level. In addition, systems-dynamics models have been employed to link production with value chain processes, simulating uptake of technologies and inputs (e.g.…”