For every Brazilian Real invested in the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in 2019, R$12.29 were returned to society. The data are from the last edition of its Social Report, published this April, which pointed out a social profit of R$46.49 billion last year. This figure was obtained through the analysis of the economic impact of 160 technological solutions and 220 cultivars developed by the Company.

The 23^rd edition of Embrapa's Social Report is another example of the seriousness with which the agricultural research challenges of the country are faced, and it points to the need for changes in view of new present national and international challenges that are being treated  by technical and executive staff of Embrapa and partners, by presenting a series of innovations promoted by the Corporation in 2019.

Such innovations include the identification of bacteria that can make soil phosphorus soluble for corn, soybeans and cotton cultivation; the improvement of an integrated food production system known as Sisteminha, which allows the production, in an hectare, of enough fish, eggs, chicken, vegetables and fruits to feed a family; the genome sequencing of tambaqui, that led to the production of quality fingerlings; the seedless grape 'BRS Vitória', which made daily harvest and exporting the fruit the whole year possible.

This vocation for change also promoted the viability, through an electronic worksheet, of a mechanism to export chicken meat named drawback; developed the BRS 5601RR cultivar, responsible for bringing Embrapa back to the soybeans market; released the AgroAPI platform to facilitate  access to countless data generated by research, enabling the creation of new software and mobile apps for the agricultural sector; and, finally, put out in the market the elephant-grass cultivar BRS Kurumi to produce quality food for bovine and ovine animals during all the seasons of the year.

The publication of the Social Report is also a good opportunity to select and describe the main contributions from Embrapa to the agricultural sector in themes such as soil management and correction; fiber, oilseeds, and cereals; animal production; fruits and nuts; vegetables and legumes; systems and services; Embrapa and partner cultivars; and the generation of new jobs. Such contributions, denominated success cases, were adopted in the Social Report as illustrative examples of the several tables of impacts and of the adoption of technological solutions presented in the publication.

"Social profit is an amount resulting from the economic benefits received by the production sector with the adoption of technological solutions created by the company. This value is calculated as the sum of profits obtained by adopters of these solutions. When we connect the social profit of R$46.49 billion in 2019 with the operational net profit of R$3.78 billion, then we have the social return rate of R$12.29 for every Brazilian Real invested in Embrapa", explains Graciela Vedevoto, analyst responsible for the Performance Assessment area from the Secretariat for Institutional Development (SDI).

Such numbers summarize, under an economic aspect, a series of contributions from Embrapa to society, and are among the main results presented in the Social Report. Other important data, also obtained from the same sample of analyzed technological solutions, are the Internal Return Rate (IRR) of 37%, which confirms the high profitability of the investments made by the State on Embrapa, and the generation of 45,516 new jobs in 2019.

The decrease in real food prices over the last decades made an increase in real salary possible, especially for those from lower income classes. This is the social gain generated by the institution which is transferred to society. When Embrapa's technical team measured that the social profit of R$46.49 billion, combined with the operational net profit of R$3.78 billion, in 2019, that enabled obtaining the social return rate of R$12.29 Brazilian Real from agricultural research. In a country with social and income disparities, there is not a more efficient distributive policy than the one that  reduces food prices for the poor population.

Technological solutions of consolidated adoption

The impact assessment identifies and measures the effects of agricultural research in farmer income, in job generation, and in the environment over a long period of time. However, it is possible to know beforehand if a given technological solution has potential to generate impacts when one analyzes how it is being adopted and incorporated to the production process. It was upon thinking about this that the Social Report's team of economists presented in the latest  edition last year, referring to 2018, a new indicator to evaluate the development of the technological solutions of consolidated adoption, which are also known as outcomes. In the previous edition this indicator was applied in a sample of 175 technologies, services, and products, whereas in this new edition, referring to 2019, this sample was expanded for 224 technologies, services, and products and it presented their respective rates of use and adoption.

The graphic below about Embrapa's Social Profit presents the total amount of economic benefits generated annually by a sample of technologies against the corporation’s annual budget in the same period. All values were corrected based on the General Prices Index (IGP-DI) from December 2019. This way it is possible to demonstrate the gain obtained by the agricultural sector as it incorporated the technological solutions created by Embrapa. Thus, it  demonstrates that governmental investment in agricultural research is highly profitable for Brazilian society.

Social profit and Embrapa's Budget from 2001 and 2019

Scientific production and downloads

Another type of assessment present in the Social Report refers to Embrapa's technical-scientific production. In a study on the number of citations of Embrapa's papers based on Web of Science (WoS) data, which indicates the impact of the Corporation’s knowledge in the scientific community, revealed that between 2011 and 2018 these citations represented an increase of 24% (118,049 citations) when compared to the previous period (2010-2017, with 95,190 citations).

The number of downloads of technical publications the Corporation made available on the internet through three repositories (Ainfo, Alice, and Infoteca) also highlights Embrapa's effectiveness. While 2018 computed 22,123,340 downloads of technical-scientific publications by the Corporation, in 2019 there was an increase of 9% of downloads, reaching a figure of 24,020,821.

Other important results

The presentation of results on the Social Report does not end with the types of assessment that had been previously carried out. Other significant topics are 1) the 1,048 actions of relevant social interest and 2) 106 awards and honors. In order to reach these numbers, in the first case, the several Embrapa centers record and classify in an electronic form all their social activities related to several topics, such as: social development and community organization; welfare, health, and job safety; environment and environmental education; food and nutritional security, and productive inclusion. Such records also make up an electronic database, accessed via the Internet, in which anyone can obtain detailed information on each of the social actions promoted by the institution. In the second case, the descriptions of the awards and honors received annually by Embrapa or its employees are sent via e-mail by Embrapa unit teams to the central Social Report team, who counts and classifies them. Check out the graph of the types of the 1,048 actions. As it can be observed, most types of social actions (43%) refer to capacity-building actions.

National and international reference

The process of assessing the impact of agricultural research developed by Embrapa, as well as the Social Report, its most evident result, are widely recognized at both the national and international levels. On national level, the highest recognition happened in 2019, when this initiative won the 23rd edition of Concurso Inovação no Setor Público (Public Sector Innovation Contest), promoted by the National School of Public Administration (Enap), in the category "innovation in organizational processes on the Federal Executive Branch". On the international level, a recent study carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, has positioned Embrapa's experience on the same level of similar prestigious institutions from the United States, France, and Australia.

Due to this wide experience, Embrapa has also been framed as a reference for many other similar research institutions, such as São Paulo’s Agency for Agribusiness Technology (APTA), the Espírito Santo Institute of Research, Technical Assistance and Rural Extension (Incaper), Agribusiness Research and Rural Extension Company of Santa Catarina (Epagri), and Agribusiness Research Company of Minas Gerais (Epamig). In 2017, the Colombian Corporation for Agricultural Research (Agrosavia) adopted Embrapa's Social Report methodology through an international cooperation deal and published its first edition of the document in the following year. In the same way, the agricultural research companies of countries participating in the Cooperative Program for the Development of Agri-food and Agricultural Technology in the Southern Cone (Procisur) - Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay - were also trained by Embrapa and started to adapt the methodology for their respective realities.

Access the Social Report https://bs.sede.embrapa.br/