Priority Setting in Agricultural Biotechnology Research: Supporting Public Decisions in Developing Countries with the Analytic Hierarchy Process

This document introduces an innovative approach to establishing priorities among biotechnology research projects. The procedure has been applied to the national technology program in Chile, for validation as a decision making tool for public research institutions. Based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), this procedure is well suited for supporting highly complex decision making, involving multiple criteria. The procedure consists of 10 steps, which are discussed in detail. It decomposes the decision-making problem into a hierarchical structure, then compares the elements of the hierarchy in pairs in order to determine their relative importance. The resulting judgments are expressed as a ranking of projects. Pairwise comparisons allow the evaluators to include subjective judgments that are reached through group discussions. This compensates for weaknesses in the information base—a problem frequently encountered in the evaluation of biotechnology research. Special decision-making criteria are selected to accommodate the special features of biotechnology research. The element of uncertainty, which is inherent to the processes of research and technology adoption, is explicitly incorporated into the analysis, through the use of special criteria for estimating a project’s chances of success. On the whole, applying this priority setting approach in Chile yielded encouraging results. For future applications, a range of modifications are suggested to further improve its efficiency and accuracy