An Economic Assessment of Banana Genetic Improvement and ...

ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGIES IN UGANDA 151
value of money. Furthermore, the economic
returns will be even larger than the ratios in
gross benefits, because there will be no offsetting
costs associated with technologies
already developed.
The only other group of technology that
ranks in the top half by size of producer
benefits is genetic modification to mitigate
the effects of banana bacteria wilt. This
technology has a shorter expected lag time
than conventional breeding, and the scale of
the damage it could help mitigate is large.
Purely conventional approaches to crop
improvement appear to offer the lowest potential
benefits (although they still might be
economically attractive, providing a high
rate of return to research investment once
costs are taken into account). This finding
does not, of course, signify that conventional
breeding is no longer needed. Genetic
modification relies fundamentally on many
conventional crop improvement activities,
meaning that the transgenic group of scenarios
might better be labeled as “genetic
modification and conventional.” Rather, the
results indicate that exclusively following
conventional approaches would be the least
desirable improvement strategy, primarily
because biotechnology appears to offer
some unique solutions to the complex breeding
issues related to sterility of bananas
(Chapter 4).
Two other aspects of the results warrant
further attention. The first is that consumer
benefits are also quite large, sometimes as
large as producer benefits. This finding
arises from the downward pressure on prices
exerted by improved productivity, relative to
the situation without the new technology.
Indeed, though prices may rise throughout
the period covered by our simulations, prices
will rise less rapidly than is the case if technological
change had not taken place. The
total benefit of the technological change is
the sum of both producer and consumer
benefits.
A second aspect of these results is that
negative producer benefits are occasionally
generated by technology scenarios. Thus,
relative to the benefits they would have received
without technical change, a group of
producers receives fewer benefits with technical
change—a decrease in welfare for that
group. This situation can arise for a number
of reasons. The most common is that other
producer groups are adopting innovations
earlier or at a faster rate and deriving greater
benefits from lower unit production costs.
Another reason is that technologies might
be biased in the sense that they deliver
greater impacts in specific production systems,
and producers in other systems cannot
take full advantage of them.
Conclusions
We have assessed the potential economic
benefits of a range of technology options
that are available to R&D policymakers and
managers in Uganda. Our results suggest
that “doing the easy things first” (better use
of knowledge already gained) may have the
highest payoffs and presumably might present
the fewest implementation challenges.
Pursuing this option alone is not enough,
however. More needs to be done, and done
relatively soon, to raise the productivity of
the banana sector, given its importance in
the diet of Ugandans and the large amount
of agricultural land currently allocated to
relatively unproductive banana systems (and
that could, by implication, be reallocated to
more economically productive uses). At the
same time, it is already a challenge to maintain
existing productivity levels. Pests and
diseases evolve, and new challenges are
faced in consolidating past gains. This realization
alone must drive the urgent need to
maintain and preferably expand the effort to
mitigate the biotic pressures that cause large
economic losses.
Our results further suggest that accelerating
the emphasis on a combined transgenicconventional
improvement strategy has several
advantages, not least of which is time.
If transgenic solutions can be derived more
quickly through such a mixed approach,
that strategy merits support.