Adoption and Impact of Hybrid Wheat in India

You know something? on a near enough daily basis, i get emails about how Genetically Modified (GM) crops are going to create Frankenstein monsters, kill everybody and every species, put people in danger, etc. etc. etc. Reasoned arguments about GM seem to have gone down the same path as that of the Mac versus Wintel or the Israeli/Palestinian arguments. All those arguments are sound, just sound.

But here comes a peer reviewed journal article on adoption and the impact of hybrid wheat in India. The paper itself has a huge amount of references to other peer reviewed and serious research done in this area, so if there are others out there who are interested to learn more about hybrid technology and agriculture, you can do worse than to look at this paper.

Note, the paper does indicate that there has to be some regulatory/governmental function to manage the deployment of this technology. By all means, small farmers are not scaled up to take the benefits of new technology and since the vast majority of farmers in the world practise subsistence farming, one cannot rely on simply the market to protect them. Otherwise, the market mechanisms are simply too fast and the gap between a full stomach and starvation too small for a hands off regulatory system to work.

Ira Matuschke, Ritesh R. Mishra and Matin Qaim, Adoption and Impact of Hybrid Wheat in India, World Development, Volume 35, Issue 8, August 2007, Pages 1422-1435. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VC6-4NX2VYF-3/2/81e7df675fc3f526cfbe4ba706786ce0)
Abstract: Summary In the light of ongoing debates about the suitability of proprietary seed technologies for smallholder farmers, this paper analyzes the adoption and impact of hybrid wheat in India. Based on survey data, we show that farmers can benefit significantly from the proprietary technology. Neither farm size nor the subsistence level influences the adoption decision, but access to information and credit does. Moreover, willingness-to-pay analysis reveals that adoption levels would be higher if seed prices were reduced. Given decreasing public support to agricultural research, policies should be targeted at reducing institutional constraints, to ensure that resource-poor farmers are not bypassed by private sector innovations. Keywords: hybrid seeds; adoption; impact; IPRs; Asia; India