The impact of privatizing agricultural research in Great Britain: An interim report on PBI and ADAS

The British government's sale of the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) to Unilever and privatization of research funding at the Agricultural Development and Advisory Service (ADAS) present a rare opportunity to examine the impact of privatization of agricultural research. Privatization led to an increase in resources for both the biotechnology part of PBI which was not privatized and the plant breeding research which was. Privatization of ADAS led to a large decline in the applied crop research conducted by ADAS. Privatization has been successful in shifting some of the cost of financing agricultural research from taxpayers to farmers. It is too early to measure privatization's impact on research output and research efficiency.