Although life has improved for many Asians, about 900 million still live in poverty (ADB, 2001), and approximately 536 million of them remain undernourished. Growth rates of yields have slowed during the period between 1987 and 2001 (Huang, Pray & Rozelle, 2002). The intensification of agriculture and the reliance on irrigation and chemical inputs resulted in problems ofsoil salinity, pesticide misuse, and degradation of natural resources. The Green Revolution technologies were useful in the favorable and irrigated environments, but they
had little impact on the millions of smallholders living in rainfed and marginal areas. Further, there has been an alarming decline in public sector investments, which account for about 90% of the total investments in agricultural research and development. Asia’s growth in agriculture research spending slowed to 4.4% in the 1990s from 7.5% in the 1980s (Pardey & Beintema, 2001). Even research investment by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR) is on the decline. The CGIAR has been instrumental in the spread of improved crop varieties of basic staples and new agricultural technologies; unfortunately, the budgets of many of its international agricultural research centers (not to mention many of
their national program counterparts) have declined sharply in real terms over the past decade. For example, from 2001–2003, annual core funding for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), one of the CGIAR centers based in the Philippines, dropped by 26%; similar
cuts are expected in the future (“Rice institute,” 2003). This is most likely due to the fact that development agencies have tended to shift funding away from agricultural research and toward other priorities
