Blogs

The Africa RISING-HarvestChoice team at IFPRI has produced three tools to help evaluate the impact of agricultural technology and R&D interventions, in terms of their profitability, benefits, and yield gap closure.
The web-based AgriTech toolbox models the impact of 10 technologies (no till, precision agriculture, water harvesting, drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation, heat tolerance, drought tolerance, nitrogen-use efficiency, crop protection) on farm yields, food prices, natural resource use, hunger, malnutrition, land used and global trade. The tool was inspired by the book “Food Security in a World of Natural Resource Scarcity: The Role of Agricultural Technologies”, launched by IFPRI in February 2014.
The profitability calculator is a spreadsheet model assessing the profitability of fertilizer application in Ethiopia. It estimates the production area over which fertilizer use is profitable and the aggregate net revenue increase under a range of price assumptions modifiable by the user.
The DREAM (Dynamic Research EvaluAtion for Management) tool is a menu-driven software package that simulates a range of market, technology adoption, research spillover, and trade policy scenarios based on a multi-market, partial equilibrium model. DREAM has also been successfully applied to analyze the effect of past research (ex post assessments), alongside ex-ante assessment of R&D investments.
By Carlo Azzarri, IFPRI