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Innovative Agricultural Technologies and the Private Sector for a Hunger – Free World
Date of Seminar: August 1, 2024
Location: New Delhi, India
A conference was organized to honor DAFRE’s Dr. Carl Pray by Chandra Nuthalapati and Prabhu Pingali from Cornell University. It was a truly international conference with scholars representing most of the regions of the world where Dr. Pray has conducted research – India, China, Brazil, Thailand, and Pakistan. Pray’s research was divided into three main topics: first, the impact of government agricultural research on agricultural development in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh; second, studies on the new agricultural technology such the Green Revolution and biotechnology and finally the role of private agricultural input firms in conducting research, innovating and spreading agricultural technology to small farms.
The speakers at the conference contributed new research findings on how limited cultural factors and educational investment in China are restricting their growthfrom a middle-income country to a high-income nation; new studies on the impact of agricultural biotechnology on global agricultural production; how the growth in total factor productivity in agriculture reduces the negative impact of agriculture on the environment and use of natural resources. Other speakers provided lessons on policies that stimulate investments by private input firms in industries such as the Chinese seed and machinery industries, Indian private input companies and agriculture related start-ups.
Dr. Pray: “It was a great honor to have my colleagues, many of whom are leaders of the agricultural economics profession, come to this conference in India to recognize my contribution through research, teaching, mentoring and conferences to the agricultural economics profession. I realized how much I had learned from them. Thanks to those who attended including my wife Mary, Rutgers colleagues Yanhong Jin and Sanjib Bhuyan, to many friends and students who could not come and to my colleagues at Rutgers for their contributions to my growth and scholarship.“
