Forestry Research

Data on resources allocated to forestry research in either developing or developed countries are not widely available.This paper presents a first attempt to construct an international inventory of spending and scientist man-years devoted to forestry research.The problems inherent in collecting internationally comparable data are discussed.Country data for about 40 countries are presented and regional estimates for investment levels worldwide are given.The data show consistently low levels of research investment in the developing countries and regions of the world.Measures of research spending and manpower intensities are also presented and compared with the same measures for agricultural research.These comparisons indicate that all countries, regardless of region or income group, have been investing more in agricultural research than in forestry research.The final data section of the paper explores some specific forestry research station characteristics obtained from approximately 140 completed survey questionnaire returns.These characteristics include the distribution of research expenditures by area of research, type of tree, and funding sources; and the distribution of personnel by administrators, scientists, and technicians.The concluding section of the paper suggests both that the inventory needs to be improved and expanded and that the area of forestry research needs to be given more emphasis by individual countries and by international aid donors.,: ... they can provide policy-makers with a basis for determining where ~evere under-investment in research or extension activities exists.The present paper develops an inventory of resources devoted to forestry research.The inventory is based primarily on returns from a mail survey of forestry research institutions, supplemented wherever possible by secondary data sources such as annual reports from specific institutions or general governmental reports on research spending in a number of fields including forestry.Although the data at this stage are incomplete because they do not cover all research institutions, the coverage they provide is sufficient to be able to make reliable estimates of global forestry research investment.The estimates of worldwide investment, while based on this preliminary inventory, do have important policy implications.They show, for example, that huge disparities exist between developed and developing countries in terms of research intensities.Developing countries have agricultural research intensities roughly one-third as high as those for developed countries.For forestry research, the intensities are less than one-tenth as high in the developing countries as they are in the developed countries.Overall, forestry research intensities are consistently lower than agricultural research intensities.In Part I of this paper, the problems inherent in compiling forestry research data are discussed.In Part II, the results of the national investment survey are reported, and then a number of comparisons between forestry research and agricultural research investment patterns are made in Part III.Data on budgets, staffing, sources of funds and program emphasis for approximately 140 research institutions are presented in Part IV.In the final section, the major trends observed in the data are discussed and

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