What good is exploratory research in the USAID Program

I was involved in the relatively small USAID program funding exploratory research for many years. I noted a couple of things that reminded me of some of the accomplishments of that program.

• I have been using Babelfish for machine translation, and was reminded that our funding helped the Pan American Health Organization develop a system for computer aided translation. That system was actually used to increase the efficiency of PAHO translators who faced time pressure to produce great translations of many reports. The work was important for the whole field.
• There was a recent television program exploring the use of diamonds in modern technology which mentioned the potential of diamonds for computer chips -- faster, smaller, etc. Some of the trailblazing work in that field was done in Russia prior to the fall of Communism, and we brought the researchers responsible for that work to an American lab to transfer the knowledge gained and begin collaborative work after the fall of Communism.
• We funded a Brazilian researcher studying biological Nitrogen fixation. Under our funding she discovered a microorganism that lives within the sugar cane plant and fixes Nitrogen from the air, supplying it directly to the plant. Thus the expensive purchase of Nitrogen fertilizer could be avoided. I have been told that as much as one-third of the sugar cane grown in Brazil was from cultivars infected with this organism -- and that is a lot of sugar cane!
• We funded a network of researchers in developing countries studying the causes of pneumonias in children. The results of that work were not only published in a special issue of a globally important journal, but together with other research results enabled the World Health Organization to revise its protocols for treatment of the disease. Respiratory disease is not only a serious cause of morbidity but of mortality, and of course the treatment of these diseases costs a huge amount globally.

We seldom funded infrastructure projects, but on one occassion we made a small grant to provide an Internet backbone for Costa Rica, which quickly became a backbone for Central America with satellite connection to the United States through another agency,

It is extremely difficult to trace the effects of small research projects, and I have been retired from USAID for a dozen years. Still, I suspect that even these few examples have an economic value which may pay for the entire program we ran for a couple of decades -- a program that funded hundreds of research grants.