Socio-economic and environmental assessment of INVITE innovations – criteria selection (D6.2)

Variety testing is a fundamental innovation process for improving the productivity and quality of plant products and the sustainability of food systems It comprises several main components which are plant breeding, variety registration, and post-registration stages. The results of variety testing at each stage are very important to deliver relevant information to the farmers as regards variety performance. Over the past three years, INVITE has focused on developing technological and institutional innovations aimed at improving the plant variety testing process. Work Package 6 (Improved Variety Testing Networks) includes a task to assess the economic, social, and environmental impacts of INVITE’s innovations through a cost benefit analysis (CBA). This deliverable aims to identify a set of suitable criteria to perform the impact assessment and the CBA of putative innovations in variety testing. The results of the CBA will facilitate the decision-making process regarding INVITE’s innovation diffusion and scaling up.

The assessment will be performed on a rather homogeneous process to be replicated. Therefore, our approach is limited to variety registration and does not take into consideration the private ex-ante breeding activities or the post-registration (public and/or private) activities. Hence, to identify the relevant criteria, first, the methodological approach is described. Then, the state of the art of the registration process is contextualised at the European level focusing on two countries (Switzerland and Spain), and two crop species (apple and wheat). Then, a list of challenges in the registration process was presented and key stakeholders were identified to provide data for the selected criteria. In addition, a set of innovations developed/tested within INVITE is described and defined based on their maturity stage or readiness level. For each innovation, a list of expected impacts is identified. To define the analytical framework, a literature review of previous approaches to assess innovations in agricultural research is presented. Then, for each set of expected impacts of innovation, a set of criteria to consider is listed.

In addition to this classical impact assessment approach, a CBA will be conducted for technological innovations including phenotyping and genotyping tools, whose expected impacts in terms of cost, resource, and time use are measurable. For institutional innovations such as new protocols for variety testing and the standardisation of guidelines across the EU will be assessed through an Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) that prioritises stakeholders’ perceptions based on criteria that are relevant in decision making for the development of new plant varieties. Through a choice experiment, farmers’ willingness to pay sustainability traits and to be included as criteria in variety testing will be elicited. The document concludes with a series of final recommendations, highlighting the importance of collaboration among the project partners and other stakeholders to obtain high quality indicators that can assist in an objective assessment of the innovations.

The deliverable report can be accessed here.

The deliverables published on the INVITE website are public and have been approved by the European Commission.