August 31, 2020
Four mungbean varieties developed by World Vegetable Center (WorldVeg) and released by the Department of Agricultural Research in Myanmar created economic gains of USD 1.4 billion from 1980 to 2016—and the benefits from this billion-dollar bean are expected to continue into the next decade.
Mungbean is generally considered a minor crop in most places. Globally, the crop is planted only on about 7.3 million hectares (rice, in comparison, is planted on 166 million hectares), and global production is about 5.3 tons (Nair and Schreinemachers, 2020).
But not so in Myanmar, where mungbean is one of the country’s main crops supporting the livelihoods of about 637,000 smallholder farm households. Myanmar accounts for 30% of global mungbean production and is by far the largest exporter of this green bean. The crop fits well in the country’s rice-based cropping systems and the output is largely sold to India rather than consumed in-country.
Harvesting mungbean in Myanmar. Photo courtesy of ACIAR
World Vegetable Center researchers began mungbean breeding activities in 1972. WorldVeg and the Department of Agricultural Research in Myanmar have been working together since the 1980s to introduce new varieties with higher yield, short maturity and better disease resistance—particularly to mungbean yellow mosaic disease. These improved varieties resulted from a long-term collaboration with national mungbean programs in India, Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan. There are nine improved mungbean varieties available in Myanmar, and five of these came from the WorldVeg program (Schreinemachers et al., 2019). Jointly, these five varieties have been adopted on 77% of the country’s mungbean area.
A study funded by the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, FCDO) and led by Teresa Sequeros, an independent consultant hired by WorldVeg, estimated the economic impact of these varieties for Myanmar (Sequeros et al., 2020). The study used the economic surplus model—a well-established method to quantify the economic impact of agricultural technologies at the aggregate level.
WorldVeg and partners have been breeding mungbean for disease resistance and consumer-preferred traits like shiny seed since the early ’70s.
The results show that mungbean research and development (R&D) in Myanmar created total economic gains of USD 1.4 billion from 1980 to 2016. Of these gains, 95% accrued to smallholder farmers and 5% accrued to consumers in Myanmar (as most of the output is exported).
Extending the analysis up to 2030, when the current varieties may be replaced by newer ones, suggests total economic gains of 3.7 billion.
These economic gains were made possible by international donors and the Myanmar government, which invested about US$ 5 million in mungbean R&D for Myanmar from 1980-2016. Calculations suggest that one dollar invested in mungbean R&D gave a mean return of 92 dollars until 2016, and will give a mean return of 181 dollars until 2030. This is an attractive return on investment for international donors, which included DFID and other long-term strategic donors of the Center.
However, the study also shows it took 20 years between the research investment and the start of impact—illustrating the fact that investments in agricultural research require a long-term, patient perspective.
The varieties that made such large impact in Myanmar contained germplasm supplied by the national agricultural research programs of India, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and perhaps also other countries. The unconditional sharing of plant genetic resources between national agricultural research systems in Asia was a key contributor to the success of the mungbean breeding initiative. Future gains in mungbean breeding will continue to depend on this spirit of collaboration.
References
Nair, R., Schreinemachers, P., 2020. Global Status and Economic Importance of Mungbean, in: Nair, R.M., Schafleitner, R., Lee, S.-H. (Eds.), The Mungbean Genome. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20008-4_1
Schreinemachers, P., Sequeros, T., Rani, S., Rashid, M.A., Gowdru, N.V., Rahman, M.S., Ahmed, M.R., Nair, R.M., 2019. Counting the beans: quantifying the adoption of improved mungbean varieties in South Asia and Myanmar. Food Security 11(3), 623-634. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-019-00926-x
Sequeros, T., Schreinemachers, P., Depenbusch, L., Shwe, T., Nair, R.M., 2020. Impact and returns on investment of mungbean research and development in Myanmar. Agriculture & Food Security 9(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40066-020-00260-y
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