According to John Ioannidis, most published research findings are false ((Ioannidis is likely of Greek extraction, perhaps even of Cretan blood?)). This is because of the Winner’s Curse: scientists need to oversell to get heard, published and funded ((Young, Ioannidis & Al-Ubaydli in PLoS Medicine; and discussed in The Economist.)).
Does this affect agrobiodiversity research?
Yes, it does.
Take this press release that came in today: “Research finds way to double rice crops in drought-stricken areas.” Right. Perhaps there were some extreme experimental conditions where this is true, but I find it hard to believe there is a magic set of markers that will let you select for double rice yield under normal drought conditions relevant for farmers. I think that’s a bit much. Perhaps the typical benefit might be as high as 10%, but that does not make for a good headline (even though it would be a staggering result, really) ((The paper’s abstract speaks of an effect of 40% in the extreme case, that’s more reasonable. I wonder if 40% means doubling to the person who wrote the press release )) .
If only, then we could also throw in the Hardy gene, for another 50% boost.
Here’s another example of overselling, say Stuart Orr and colleagues ((Stuart Orr, James Sumberg, Olaf Erenstein & Andreas Oswald. 2008. Funding international agricultural research and the need to be noticed. A case study of NERICA rice. Outlook on Agriculture 37:159-168.)) in a recent review article on NERICA — “New Rice for Africa”.
NERICA is a group of rice varieties produced at the Africa Rice Center (WARDA). They have been produced after a breakthrough in rice genetics, the use of embryo rescue to cross Asian (Oryza sativa) with West African (O. glaberrima) rice. The offspring of these crosses has been back-crossed a number of times with sativa parents such as IR64.
NERICA varieties have been referred to as “miracle rice” and are said to be higher yielding, have higher quality, compete better with weeds, be more stress resistant, etc. etc. etc. This has created a lot of interest, enthusiasm and funding for their continued development and dissemination. Orr says that all the hoopla about NERICA is not backed up by the (published) facts. This perhaps explains why adoption of NERICA varieties is not what was hoped for.
Wopereis and colleagues ((MCS Wopereis, A Diagne, J Rodenburg, M Sié & EA Somado. 2008. Why NERICA is a successful innovation for African farmers. A response to Orr et al. from the Africa Rice Center. Outlook on Agriculture 37:169-176.)) defend WARDA and NERICA saying that NERICAs perform well, that there are new published data, that the outlandish claims were made by others, and that there is nothing wrong with enthusiasm.
I do not know how good NERICAs are, but some farmers like them, which is good. And WARDA definitely has created a renewed interest in breeding rice varieties for Africa, where many, it seems, had given up. That’s good too. Better still would be to move beyond the NERICA brand, and try and disseminate a broad and diverse set of varieties. Let the farmers decide.
As I always say, you don’t have to be right, it is enough to be less wrong than you were before. What I find interesting about the way this is phrased is that the corollary is that competing claims are also more then likely to be false. So when it comes to deciding which of several claims is more likely to be true, knowing this fact can be very instructive. It’s why the random tiny study here or there that seems to contradict a consensus (and large body of evidence supporting it) doesn’t mean much to scientists working a field.
Good find. Of course, the drawback to this paper is that it does kind of undermine itself a bit by definition, doesn’t it?
Yes, it is a paradox. And agreed that in research it is good enough to try to be closer to the truth. However, fads can easily take over from facts, i.e. even if there is not a large body of work supporting it. That is what Orr et al argue in the case of NERICA. Now whether their critique is justified or not, the need to keep the money flowing certainly provides an incentive to oversell. If, in the end, that leads to poor investments, I do not know, but I do think so.
The NYT had an article about Nerica about a year ago.
The Nerica fad is new and old. The varieties are new. But the approach is all about trying to do the Green Revolution in Africa (again, after more than one failure). The problem is not about the Nericas themselves, but the top-down approach to innovation systems that may undermine instead of boost local innovation capacities, including those of farmers.
@Jacob – I met some people yesterday — not experts, film-makers — who were just back from northern Mali, where Vietnamese agronomists and local farmers, supported by a French commune, were revitalizing the local rice-based system. Seemed to be working too, without fancy inputs or over-selling. But the problem they isolated was that this was actually quite a tiny project, and the big agricultural R&D outfits, and the agencies that support them, have deemed the transaction costs of scores of little projects too high. So we have big, top-down projects, because they’re more “efficient”.
@Jeremy
Nice you brought that up and I would like to know more about the project. However, I think that local innovation skills are not incompatible with “big” projects, that make smart use of scale economies.
Almost a decade ago, Paul Richards had a “modest” proposal to distribute all rice genebank accessions by dropping them randomly from a plane flying over Africa. Local farmers could then do the rest: testing and selecting the best seeds, exchange them, and create even more diversity by selecting interesting crosses.
This was a serious joke. The point is that “local” is not synonymous to “small”. In my eyes, the best type of system would combine local innovation with regional exchange and coordination.
Now I see little of that. For instance, a wealth of information comes out of participatory variety selection (PVS) trials but very little is used as part of an iterative learning process. It is still very much an end-of-the-pipeline thing.
Richards, P. 1999. “Casting seeds to the four winds: a modest proposal for plant genetic diversity management”, in Posey, D.A. (ed) Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, Nairobi & London: UNEP & IT Publications.
I had forgotten that gedanken experiment, which is all the more apposite these days. One of the key issues in all this is how you achieve the scaling-up. Some people think the only way is through market mechanisms. But we now know — don’t we — that those don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. Richards’ plane is another approach. Any others?