Research projects with multiple objectives are acknowledged as especially difficult prioritisation problems. If the objectives of the research agency include improved sustainability of agriculture and other objectives to redistribute wealth from rich city consumers to poor country folk, then the methodology proposed to prioritise research alternatives suffers serious inadequacies. How to evaluate expected outcomes against more than one criterion is a problem that plagues most scientific endeavours. The approach offered by these authors is to convert all the outcomes to monetary terms, thus rendering everything as a nail. Such an approach will hardly find universal appeal.
Sustainability is a fashionable objective of many agricultural research agencies.
Sustainability is not only difficult to define, it is also difficult to measure in today's, tomorrow's or the next generation's dollars. Also missing from the economists' toolbox is a useable tool to handle uncertainty. Research is plagued by uncertainty. Despite the importance of uncertainty, the authors give little attention to how this should be accommodated in the prioritisation of projects. It is intended, by the authors, to be of direct interest to research administrators.