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Abstract
Fruit flies are recognised as one of the major pests of fruit and vegetable crops worldwide.
Potential benefits from fruit fly research include biosecurity benefits from better quarantine
surveillance that reduces the costs of an incursion by a damaging exotic pest fruit fly; market
access benefits by enabling new fruit exports; and field control benefits from better crop
management.
The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR)’s investment in fruitfly
research goes back some 25 years to an initial project in Malaysia. Since that time,
ACIAR’s continued investment has funded a total of 18 projects ranging across several areas
of fruit-fly research, and covering Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Fiji Islands, Samoa,
Tonga, Cook Islands, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM),
Papua New Guinea, Bhutan, Vietnam, Laos, and Indonesia. In an impact assessment study of
all 18 ACIAR projects, Lindner and McLeod (2008) calculated that the present value (PV) of
the total direct investment in these projects by ACIAR and its partners has been A$50.76
million. The PV of total quantifiable realised and prospective benefits that can be attributed
to the direct investment by ACIAR and its partners was estimated to exceed A$258.84
million. Of this total PV of quantifiable benefits, A$212.63 million was calculated to accrue
to partner-countries. In this paper, the question of why many potential benefits to partner-countries
have not been realised to date, and why some future prospective benefits are
problematic is examined.
While the total value of benefits generated from the investment by ACIAR and its partners is
impressive, the pattern of benefits is variable by type of benefit and by country. One of the
most important general lessons, widely known but reinforced by the results from this study, is
that while successful research project outcomes may be necessary to enable potential
benefits, they rarely are sufficient for benefits to be realised. In particular, potential benefits
will only be realised if there is uptake of project outputs. While it is recognized that the
conditions for uptake are typically well beyond the influence of the researchers both in time
and scope, at the time of project formulation, the necessary conditions for adoption of project
outputs often seem to receive insufficient attention. Notwithstanding some 20 years of
research on the development of low-cost protein bait sprays from brewery waste, the benefits
are still essentially prospective and it has not been conclusively demonstrated that the use of
these sprays will be widely adopted as a cost-effective alternative to existing practices in
developing countries.