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After recently marking 40 years of activity, BARD took the opportunity to commission a comprehensive external review to evaluate the fund’s cumulative impact over four decades—and the benefits of this visionary enterprise have been tremendous.

BARD’s investment over 40 years was $1.06 billion (in 2018 dollar-terms) in a total of 1,330 research projects. An economic analysis of 20 selected top case studies showed that those projects alone yielded an economic benefit exceeding 16.5 billion dollars, representing a more than 16-fold return of all BARD’s expenses over this period (Benefit Cost Ratio, BCR = 16.7).           

  • The analysis also determined that the BARD grants supported human capacity building in most projects on BARD portfolio and resulted in an economic additional benefit of $3 billion. Together with the economic benefit from its research projects, the overall benefit of BARD’s activities yielded a BCR exceeding 20; Thus, BARD generated a $20 return on every one dollar it invested.

  • It is worth stating that the 20 selected case studies - alone created some 1,500 new jobs in the U.S. and Israel.

BARD is extremely proud to take part in growing the science and academic reserves behind the sustainable and profitable agricultural industries that are the building blocks of both the United States and Israel’s long-term social and economic resilience. The world’s population is expected to reach around 10 billion by 2050, and as humanity grows, so do the agricultural challenges ahead. The time to prepare is now. Today, our need for a strong standing agriculture is even more prominent investing in our agriculture is investing in our welfare and future.

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