Economic Growth
As Samuel Johnson said, “Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.” No country has ever successfully developed without first modernizing its agriculture. Recent studies have provided evidence of a causal relationship.
Climate Adaptation
Agriculture is one of the human activities most sensitive to climate change. The cost of developing crops that resist drought and other climatic stresses is orders of magnitude less than the investment in clean energy required to significantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
National Security
The prime minister of Haiti was ousted in 2008 over handling of food riots, caused by high prices that followed decades of reduced investment in agricultural research. Recent studies have demonstrated that, unless there’s something about droughts in Africa that affects politics outside of their effect on agriculture, droughts lead to crop failures and crop failures make wars more likely. Anecdotal evidence links problems in agriculture to wars and terrorism worldwide.
Education & Employment
Economists who subscribe to the Todaro Hypothesis believe that the only effective way to reduce urban unemployment in developing countries is to improve opportunities in rural areas. Evidence from India suggests that areas whose geography helped farmers benefit most from new agricultural innovations saw greater improvements in education.
Women and Minorities
Women and minorities do not always benefit from agricultural technologies–witness the growth of slavery after the cotton gin was invented. But they definitely can see disproportionate benefits, particularly from research targeted towards fruits and vegetables (for women) and marginal lands (for minorities). One study from a Brown University professor even suggested that expanding the cultivation of tea, a crop harvested by women, reduced the selective abortion of female fetuses in China.
Health and Nutrition
Improvements in nutrition and sanitation, as well as improved medical care, have played key roles in improving health and life expectancy since the 19th Century. Improving sanitation often requires expensive investments in infrastructure, while developing more nutritious crops can be done on a shoe-string budget and probably represents one of the most cost-effective ways to improve public health. Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest challenges on the horizon in health care, and better ways of keeping livestock healthy and productive without antibiotics may help to slow resistance.
