The Green Revolu tion brought high-yielding semi-dwarf wheat and rice varieties, developed with conventional breeding methods, to millions of small-scale farmers, initially in Asia and Latin America, but later in Africa as well. The gains achieved during the early decades of the Green Revolution were extended in the 1980s and 1990s to other crops and to less favoured regions (Evenson and Gollin, 2003). In comparison with the research that drove the Green Revolution, the majority of agricultural biotechnology research and almost all of the commercialization is being carried out by private firms based in industrialized countries.
This is a dramatic departure from the Green Revolution, in which the public sector played a strong role in research and technology diffusion. This paradigm shift has important implications for the kind of research that is performed, the types of technologies that are developed and the way these technologies are disseminated. The dominance of the private sector in agricultural biotechnology raises concerns that farmers in developing countries, particularly poor farmers, may not benefit - either because appropriate innovations are not available or are too expensive.
Public-sector research was responsible for creating the high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice that launched the Green Revolution. International and national public-sector researchers bred dwarfing genes into elite wheat and rice cultivars, causing them to produce more grain and have shorter stems and enabling them to respond to higher levels of fertilizer and water. These semi-dwarf cultivars were made freely available to plant breeders from developing countries who further adapted them to meet local production conditions. Private firms were involved in the development and commercialization of locally adapted varieties in some countries, but the improved germplasm was provided by the public sector and disseminated freely as a public good (Pingali and Raney, 2003).
The countries that were able to make the most of the opportunities presented by the Green Revolution were those that had, or quickly developed, strong national capacity in agricultural research. Researchers in these countries were able to make the necessary local adaptations to ensure that the improved varieties suited the needs of their farmers and consumers. National agricultural research capacity was a critical determinant of the availability and accessibility of Green Revolution agricultural technologies, and this remains true today for new biotechnologies. National research capacity increases the ability of a country to import and adapt agricultural technologies developed elsewhere, to develop applications that address local needs (e.g. “orphan crops”) and to regulate new technologies appropriately.
The biotechnology revolution, by contrast, is being driven largely by the private sector. Public-sector research has contributed to the basic science underpinning agricultural biotechnology, but the private sector is responsible for most applied research and almost all commercial development. Three interrelated forces are transforming the system for providing improved agricultural technologies to the world's farmers. The first is the strengthening environment for protecting intellectual property in plant innovations. The second is the rapid pace of discovery and the growing importance of molecular biology and genetic engineering. Finally, agricultural input and output trade is becoming more open in nearly all countries, enlarging the potential market for new technologies and older related technologies. These developments have created powerful new incentives for private research, and are altering the structure of the public/private agricultural research endeavour, particularly with respect to crop improvement (Pingali and Traxler, 2002).
With the growing importance of the private transnational sector, developing countries are facing increasing transaction costs in access to and use of technologies. Existing public-sector international networks for sharing technologies across countries and thereby maximizing spillover benefits are becoming increasingly threatened. The urgent need today is for a system of technology flows that preserves the incentives for private-sector innovation while at the same time meeting the needs of poor farmers in the developing world.
The first section of this chapter presents an overview of the organization and impacts of agricultural research and technology flows in the period 1960-90, when the Green Revolution paradigm of international, public-sector research held sway. The second section discusses the movement towards the increased privatization of agricultural research and development and its consequences for developing country access to technologies as revealed in recent global trends in biotechnology research, development and commercialization. The concluding section raises a number of questions regarding the potential of the Gene Revolution to benefit the poor. These questions are taken up in the subsequent chapters of the report.
SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION 1 Norman E. Borlaug1 During the past 35 years, cereal production has more than doubled, expanding faster than world population growth. Rapid adoption of modern varieties, a threefold increase in chemical fertilizer consumption and a doubling in irrigated area were key factors driving this Green Revolution. By increasing yields on the lands best suited to agriculture, world farmers have been able to leave untouched vast areas of land for other purposes. The world population may reach 10 billion by the middle of this century. Over the next 20 years, world cereal demand will increase by 50 percent, driven by rapidly growing animal feed use and meat consumption. With the exception of acid-soil areas in Africa and South America, the potential for expanding global crop area is limited. Future expansions in food output must come largely from land already in use. The productivity of this land must be sustained and improved. Most of the world's 842 million hungry people live in marginal lands and depend upon agriculture for their livelihoods. Food-insecure households in these higher-risk rural areas face frequent droughts, degraded lands, remoteness from markets and poor market institutions. For many of these people, food security will only come through increased agricultural production and income. Investments in science, infrastructure and resource conservation are needed to increase productivity and lower risks in marginal lands. Some of the problems in such environments will be too formidable to overcome. However, significant improvements should be possible. Biotechnology will play an important role in developing new germplasm with greater tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses and with higher nutritional content. Continued genetic improvement of food crops - using conventional research tools and biotechnology - is needed to shift the yield frontier higher and to increase stability of yield. Neolithic man - or much more likely woman - domesticated virtually all of our food and livestock species over a relatively short period, 10 000-15 000 years ago. Subsequently, several hundred generations of farmers were responsible for making enormous genetic modifications in all of our major crop and animal species. Thanks to the development of science over the past 150 years, we now have the insights into plant genetics and breeding to do purposefully what Nature did in the past by chance or design. Genetic modification of crops is not some kind of witchcraft; rather, it is the progressive harnessing of the forces of nature to the benefit of feeding the human race. Indeed, genetic engineering - plant breeding at the molecular level - is just another step in humankind's deepening scientific journey into living genomes. It is not a replacement for conventional breeding but a complementary research tool to identify desirable traits from remotely related taxonomic groups and transfer them more quickly and precisely into high-yielding, high-quality crop species. The world has the technology - already available or well advanced in the research pipeline - to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. However, access to such technology is not assured. The range of potential barriers includes issues related to intellectual property rights, technology acceptance by civil society and governments, and financial and educational barriers that keep poor farmers marginalized and unable to adopt new technology. 1 Norman Borlaug is President of the Sasakawa Africa Association, Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture, Texas A&M University, and the winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. He is known as the father of the Green Revolution for his pioneering work in wheat breeding and production. |
The Green Revolution was responsible for an extraordinary period of growth in food crop productivity in the developing world over the last 40 years (Evenson and Gollin, 2003). A combination of high rates of investment in crop research, infrastructure and market development, and appropriate policy support fuelled this progress. These elements of the Green Revolution strategy improved productivity growth despite increasing land scarcity and high land values (Pingali and Heisey, 2001).
The Green Revolution defied the conventional wisdom that agricultural technology does not travel well because it is either agroclimatically specific, as in the case of biological technology, or sensitive to relative factor prices, as with mechanical technology (Byerlee and Traxler, 2002). The Green Revolution strategy for food-crop productivity growth was explicitly based on the premise that, given appropriate institutional mechanisms, technology spillovers across political and agroclimatic boundaries could be created. Hence the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was established specifically to generate technology spillovers, particularly for countries that are unable to capture all the benefits of their research investments. What happens to the spillover benefits from agricultural research and development in an increasingly global integration of food supply systems?
The major breakthroughs in yield potential that kick-started the Green Revolution in the late 1960s came from conventional plant-breeding approaches that initially focused on raising yield potential for the major cereal crops. The yield potential for the major cereals has continued to rise at a steady rate after the initial dramatic shifts in the 1960s for rice and wheat. For example, yield potential in irrigated wheat has been rising at the rate of 1 percent per year over the past three decades, an increase of around 100 kg/ha/year (Pingali and Rajaram, 1999). Essentially, no research or elite germplasm was available for many of the crops grown by poor farmers in less favourable agro-ecological zones (such as sorghum, millet, barley, cassava and pulses) during the early decades of the Green Revolution, but since the 1980s modern varieties have been developed for these crops and their yield potential has risen (Evenson and Gollin, 2003). In addition to their work on shifting the yield frontier of cereal crops, plant breeders continue to have successes in the less glamorous but no less important areas of applied research. These include development of plants with durable resistance to a wide spectrum of insects and diseases, plants that are better able to tolerate a variety of physical stresses, crops that require a significantly lower number of days of cultivation, and cereal grain with enhanced taste and nutritional qualities.
Prior to 1960, there was no formal system in place that provided plant breeders with access to germplasm available beyond their borders. Since then, the international public sector (the CGIAR system) has been the predominant source of supply of improved germplasm developed from conventional breeding approaches, especially for self-pollinating crops such as rice and wheat and for open-pollinated maize. These CGIAR-managed networks evolved in the 1970s and 1980s, when financial resources for public agricultural research were expanding and plant intellectual property laws were weak or non-existent. The exchange of germplasm is based on a system of informal exchange among plant breeders that is generally open and without charge. Breeders can contribute any of their material to the nursery and take pride in its adoption elsewhere in the world, while at the same time they are free to pick material from the trials for their own use.
The international flow of germplasm has had a large impact on the speed and the cost of crop development programmes of national agricultural research systems (NARS), thereby generating enormous efficiency gains (Evenson and Gollin, 2003). Traxler and Pingali (1999) argued that the existence of a free and uninhibited system of germplasm exchange that attracts the best of international materials allows countries to make strategic decisions on the extent to which they need to invest in plant-breeding capacity. Even NARS with advanced crop research programmes, such as in Brazil, China and India, rely heavily on cultivars taken from these nurseries for their prebreeding material and for finished varieties (Evenson and Gollin, 2003). Small countries behaving rationally choose to free-ride on the international system rather than invest in large crop-breeding infrastructure of their own (Maredia, Byerlee and Eicher, 1994).
Evenson and Gollin (2003) report that, even in the 1990s, the CGIAR content of modern varieties was high for most food crops; 35 percent of all varietal releases were based on CGIAR crosses, and an additional 22 percent had a CGIAR-crossed parent or other ancestor. Evenson and Gollin suggest that germplasm contributions from international centres enabled developing countries to capture the spillover benefits of investments in crop improvement made outside their borders and achieve productivity gains that would have been more costly or even impossible had they been forced to work only with the genetic resources that were available at the beginning of the period.
Substantial empirical evidence exists on the production, productivity, income and human welfare impacts of modern agricultural science and the international flow of modern varieties of food crops. Evenson and Gollin (2003) provide detailed information on the extent of adoption and impact of modern variety use for all the major food crops. The adoption of modern varieties (averaged across all crops) increased rapidly during the two decades of the Green Revolution, and even more rapidly in the following decades, from 9 percent in 1970 to 29 percent in 1980, 46 percent in 1990 and 63 percent by 1998. Moreover, in many areas and in many crops, first-generation modern varieties have been replaced by second- and third-generation modern varieties (Evenson and Gollin, 2003).
Much of the increase in agricultural output over the past 40 years has come from an increase in yield per hectare rather than an expansion of area under cultivation. For instance, FAO data indicate that for all developing countries, wheat yields rose 208 percent from 1960 to 2000; rice yields rose 109 percent; maize yields rose 157 percent; potato yields rose 78 percent and cassava yields rose 36 percent (FAO, 2003). Trends in total factor productivity are consistent with partial productivity measures, such as rate of yield growth (Pingali and Heisey, 2001).
The returns to investments in high-yielding modern germplasm have been measured in great detail by several economists over the last few decades. Several recent reports have reviewed and analysed the data from hundreds of studies conducted over the last 30 years that calculated the social rates of return to investments in agricultural research. These studies examined investments by national and international public-sector institutions in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries as well as by the private sector (Alston et al., 2000; Evenson and Gollin, 2003). Although these studies were carried out using a variety of different methods, they showed considerable consistency. The average social rate of return to public investment in agricultural research reported in these studies is in the region of 40-50 percent. Private-sector research was also found to generate similar rates of social returns.
The primary effect of agricultural research on the non-farm poor, as well as on the rural poor who are net purchasers of food, is through lower food prices. The wide-spread adoption of modern seed-fertilizer technology led to a significant shift in the food supply function, increasing output and contributing to a fall in real food prices:
The effect of agricultural research on improving the purchasing power of the poor - both by raising their incomes and by lowering the prices of staple food products - is probably the major source of nutritional gains associated with agricultural research. Only the poor go hungry. Because a relatively high proportion of any income gains made by the poor is spent on food, the income effects of research-induced supply shifts can have major nutritional implications, particularly if those shifts result from technologies aimed at the poorest producers.
(Alston, Norton and Pardey, 1995: 85)
Studies by economists have provided empirical support for the proposition that growth in the agriculture sector has economy-wide effects. Hayami et al. (1978) illustrated at the village level that rapid growth in rice production stimulated demand and prices for land, labour and non-agricultural goods and services. For sector-level validation of the proposition that agriculture does indeed act as an engine of overall economic growth, see Hazell and Haggblade (1993); Delgado, Hopkins and Kelly (1998); and Fan, Hazell and Thorat (1998).
Once modern varieties have been adopted, the next set of technologies that makes a significant difference in reducing production costs includes machinery, land management practices (often in association with herbicide use), fertilizer use, integrated pest management and (most recently) improved water management practices. Although many Green Revolution technologies were developed and extended in package form (e.g. new plant varieties plus recommended fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide rates, along with water control measures), many components of these technologies were taken up in a piecemeal, often stepwise manner (Byerlee and Hesse de Polanco, 1986). The sequence of adoption is determined by factor scarcities and the potential cost savings achieved. Herdt (1987) provided a detailed assessment of the sequential adoption of crop management technologies for rice in the Philippines. Traxler and Byerlee (1992) provided similar evidence on the sequential adoption of crop management technologies for wheat in Sonora, northwestern Mexico.
Although the favourable, high-potential environments gained the most from the Green Revolution in terms of productivity growth, the less favourable environments also benefited through technology spillovers and through labour migration to more productive environments. According to David and Otsuka (1994), wage equalization across favourable and unfavourable environments was one of the primary means of redistributing the gains of technological change. Renkow (1993) found similar results for wheat grown in high- and low-potential environments in Pakistan. Byerlee and Moya (1993), in their global assessment of the adoption of modern varieties of wheat, found that over time the adoption of modern varieties in unfavourable environments caught up with those in more favourable environments, particularly when germplasm developed for high-potential environments was further adapted to the more marginal environments. In the case of wheat, the rate of growth in yield potential in drought-prone environments was around 2.5 percent per year during the 1980s and 1990s (Lantican and Pingali, 2003). Initially, the growth in yield potential for the marginal environments came from technological spillovers as varieties bred for the high-potential environments were adapted to the marginal environments. During the 1990s, however, further gains in yield potential came from breeding efforts targeted specifically at the marginal environments.
SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION 2 M.S. Swaminathan1 In August 1968, the Government of India issued a stamp entitled “Wheat Revolution” to generate public awareness of the revolutionary pathway India had entered in relation to increasing wheat production. Even while highlighting the yield breakthrough in wheat, the Government had also launched a massive programme to develop and spread high-yielding varieties for rice, maize, sorghum and pearl millet. These programmes were the drivers of the “Green Revolution” in India, which permitted striking advances in production and productivity without increasing cultivated area. Because these high-yielding varieties require inputs such as fertilizer and irrigation water, social scientists criticized the Green Revolution technologies for not being resource neutral. Environmentalists attacked the Green Revolution because of potential damage to long-term productivity as a result of excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers and monocropping. Despite the success of the Green Revolution in raising millions of people out of misery, the incidence of poverty, endemic hunger, communicable diseases, infant and maternal mortality rates, low birth-weight children, stunting and illiteracy remain high. The concerns of social scientists and ecologists and the remaining urgent problems of poverty and hunger led to my developing the concept of an “evergreen revolution” to stress the need for enhancing crop productivity in perpetuity without associated ecological or social harm. An evergreen revolution can be achieved only if we pay attention to pathways that can help to achieve revolutionary progress in enhancing productivity, quality and value-addition under conditions of diminishing per capita arable land and irrigation water availability, expanding biotic and abiotic stresses, and fast-changing consumer and market preferences. This will require mobilizing the best in both traditional wisdom and technologies and frontier science. Among the frontier technologies relevant to the next stage in our agricultural revolution, the foremost is biotechnology. The apprehensions relating to molecular genetics and genetic engineering fall under the following broad categories: the science itself, the control of the science, access to the science, environmental concerns, and human and animal health. A disaggregated approach to the study of these issues will be important for a rigorous analysis of risks and benefits. Dealing with these issues in a composite manner for all applications of genetic engineering will result in inappropriately broad conclusions, such as the general condemnation of GMOs expressed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at the World Food Summit: five years later held in Rome in 2002. The benefits of molecular breeding techniques such as the use of molecular markers and undertaking precision breeding for specific characters through recombinant DNA technology are immense. The work already performed in India has revealed the potential for breeding new GM varieties possessing tolerance to salinity, drought and some major pests and diseases, together with improved nutritive quality. A new era of integrated Mendelian and molecular breeding has begun. An evergreen revolution will blend these frontier technologies with the ecological prudence of traditional communities to create technologies that are based on integrated natural resource management and that are location specific because they are developed through participatory experimentation with farm families. This is the only way we can face the challenges of the future, particularly in the context of the growing water scarcity and the urgent need to step up productivity in semi-arid and dry farming areas. Accelerated agricultural progress is the best safety net against hunger and poverty, because in most developing countries over 70 percent of the population depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Denying ourselves the power of the new genetics will be doing a great disservice both to resource-poor farming families and to the building of a sustainable national food and nutrition system. 1 The author is the Chair of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation. He has worked for the past 50 years with scientists and policy-makers on a range of problems in basic and applied plant genetics as well as in agricultural research and development. He is widely known as the father of the Green Revolution in India. |
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, private-sector investment in plant improvement research was limited, particularly in the developing world, owing to the lack of effective mechanisms for proprietary protection of the improved products (Box 12). This situation changed in the 1990s with the emergence of hybrids for cross-pollinated crops such as maize. The economic viability of hybrids led to a budding seed industry in the developing world, started by transnational companies from the developed world and followed by the development of national companies (Morris, 1998). Despite the rapid growth of the seed industry in developing countries, its activity has been limited to date, leaving many markets underserved.
The incentives for private-sector agricultural research increased further when the United States and other industrialized countries permitted the patenting of artificially constructed genes and genetically modified plants. These national protections were strengthened by the 1995 Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which obliges WTO members to provide patent protection for biotechnology inventions (products or processes) and protection for plant varieties either through patents or a sui generis system. These proprietary protections provided the incentives for private sector entry in agricultural biotechnology research (Box 12).
The large transnational agrochemical companies were the early investors in the development of transgenic crops, although much of the basic scientific research that paved the way was conducted by the public sector and made available to private companies through exclusive licences. One of the reasons why agrochemical companies moved into transgenic crop research and development was that they foresaw a declining market for pesticides and were looking for new products (Conway, 2000).
The chemical companies moved quickly into plant improvement by purchasing existing seed companies, first in industrialized countries and then in the developing world. These mergers between national seed companies and multinational corporations made economic sense because the two specialize in different aspects of the seed variety development and delivery process (Pingali and Traxler, 2002). This process is a continuum that starts upstream with generating knowledge on useful genes (genomics) and engineering transgenic plants and then moves downstream to the more adaptive process of backcrossing the transgenes into commercial lines and delivering the seed to farmers. The products from upstream activities have worldwide applicability across several crops and agro-ecological environments. By contrast, genetically modified crops and varieties are typically applicable to specific agro-ecological niches. In other words, spillover benefits and scale economies decline in the move to the more adaptive end of the continuum. Similarly, research costs and research sophistication decline in the progression towards downstream activities. Thus, a clear division of responsibilities in the development and delivery of biotechnology products has emerged, with the transnational firm providing the upstream biotechnology research and the local firm providing crop varieties with commercially desirable agronomic backgrounds (Pingali and Traxler, 2002).
The options available for capturing the spillovers from global corporations are less clear for public research systems. Public-sector research programmes are generally established to conform to state or national political boundaries, and direct country-to-country transfer of technologies has been limited (Pingali and Traxler, 2002). Strict adherence to political domains severely curtails spillover benefits of technological innovations across similar agroclimatic zones. The operation of the CGIAR germplasm exchange system has mitigated the problem for several important crops, but it is not clear whether the system will work for biotechnology products and transgenic crops, given the proprietary nature of the technology.
BOX 12 Public goods are those that generate benefits for society beyond the private returns that can be captured by the person who created them. These benefits are sometimes called spillovers. Public goods are non-rival and non-excludable. Non-rivalry implies that the good is equally available to all, i.e. consumption by one person does not reduce the amount that is available for others to consume. Non-excludability means that people who do not pay for the product cannot be prevented from using it. These characteristics mean that private innovators cannot capture the full social benefit of their creation unless some means can be found to prevent unauthorized use. Because private firms cannot profit fully from research that produces public goods, they will not invest in a socially optimal level of research (Ruttan, 2001). Much of the output of agricultural research, including biotechnology research, has one or both of the characteristics of a public good. For example, any scientist can use knowledge about the structure of the rice genome without reducing the amount of knowledge available to other scientists, and once that knowledge is published in an academic journal or on the Web, it is difficult to exclude other people from using it. A transgenic plant variety, on the other hand, may have public good characteristics to some degree (e.g. it is difficult to exclude unauthorized users completely) but it is not a pure public good because seeds can be used up and unauthorized use can be at least partially prevented. There are two ways to prevent the unauthorized use of plant varieties - biological and legal. Hybrid seeds can be saved, reproduced and replanted but only at a significant loss in yield and quality, so hybridization provides a biological protection for the breeder's innovation. Genetic use-restriction technologies are another form of biological intellectual property protection that has been proposed for transgenic crops. These technologies would produce sterile seeds or seeds that require the application of a special chemical to activate the innovative trait. Public opposition to the sterile-seed approach has led the private company Monsanto to abandon its development. Legal protection such as patents, trademarks and contracts can also be used to protect intellectual property, but these methods usually provide incomplete protection. |
To understand the magnitude of private-sector investment in agricultural biotechnology research today, one need only look at its annual research budget relative to public research targeted at developing country agriculture (Pray and Naseem, 2003a). The world's top ten transnational bioscience corporations' collective annual expenditure on agricultural biotechnology research and development is nearly $3 billion. By comparison, the CGIAR, which is the largest international public-sector supplier of agricultural technologies, has a total annual budget of less than $300 million for plant improvement research and development. The largest public-sector agricultural research programmes in the developing world - those of Brazil, China and India - have annual budgets of less than half a billion dollars each (Byerlee and Fischer, 2002).
Looking at agricultural biotechnology research expenditures reveals a sharp dichotomy between developed and developing countries (Table 3). Developed countries spend four times as much as developing countries on public-sector biotechnology research, even when all sources of public funds - national, donor and CGIAR centres - are counted for developing countries. Few developing countries or international public-sector institutions have the resources to create an independent source of biotechnology innovations (Byerlee and Fischer, 2002).
Comprehensive data on private-sector biotechnology research in developing countries are not available, although most research appears to be carried out by transnational companies conducting trials of their transgenic varieties. Some work is being done by local research institutes (e.g. local private sugar-cane research institutes have fairly large biotechnology research programmes in Brazil and South Africa), whereas in India several local seed companies (notably the Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company [Mahyco]) have biotechnology research programmes. The total investment of these private efforts is unknown but it is undoubtedly less than the public sector is investing in biotechnology research in developing countries (Pray and Naseem, 2003a).
TABLE 3
Estimated crop biotechnology research expenditures
(Million $/year) |
(Percentage) |
|
Biotechnology R&D |
Biotechnology as share of sector R&D |
|
INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES |
1 900-2 500 |
|
Private sector 1 |
1 000-1 500 |
40 |
Public sector |
900-1 000 |
16 |
DEVELOPING COUNTRIES |
165-250 |
|
Public (own resources) |
100-150 |
5-10 |
Public (foreign aid) |
40-50 |
… |
CGIAR centres |
25-50 |
8 |
Private sector |
… |
… |
WORLD TOTAL |
2 065-2 730 |
|
1 Includes an unknown amount of R&D for developing countries. |
||
Although total biotechnology research expenditures are fairly evenly divided between the public and private sectors, the production of new technologies is almost entirely in the hands of the private sector.1 The private sector has developed all the genetically transformed crops that have been commercialized in the world to date, with the exception of those in China (see Chapter 4). The dominance of the private sector in developing GM varieties suggests that the crops and production constraints of particular importance to the poor may be neglected because the markets for these seeds are probably quite small.
More than 11 000 field trials of 81 different transgenic crops have been performed since 1987 when the first trials were approved (Figure 1 and Table 4), but only 15 percent have taken place in developing or transition countries.2 This reflects the perceived lack of commercial potential in these markets and the difficulties their governments have had in establishing a regulatory system for biosafety. The number of trials in developed and transition countries has increased in recent years and at least 58 countries had reported field trials for transgenic crops by 2000 (Pray, Courtmanche and Govindasamy, 2002). Some countries have stopped field trials in certain years while re-evaluating their biosafety system.
The concern that the crops and traits of importance to developing countries could be neglected is validated by the data on field trials (Table 4, Figures 2 and 3). Staple food crops have been the subject of very little applied biotechnology research, although field trials for wheat and rice, the most important food crops in developing countries, have increased in recent years and a transgenic cassava variety was tested for the first time in 2000. Other staple food crops such as bananas, sweet potatoes, lentils and lupins have all been approved for field testing in one or more countries.
Almost two-thirds of the field trials in industrialized countries and three-quarters of those in developing countries focus on two traits: herbicide tolerance and insect resistance or a combination of the two traits together (Figures 2 and 3). Although insect resistance is an important trait for developing countries, herbicide resistance may be less relevant in areas where farm labour is abundant. By contrast, agronomic traits of particular importance to developing countries and marginal production areas, such as potential yields and abiotic stress tolerance (e.g. drought and salinity), are the subject of very few field trials in industrialized countries and even fewer in developing countries.
TABLE 4
Field trials by crop and region
Maize |
Canola |
Potato |
Soybean |
Cotton |
Tomato |
Sugar beet |
Tobacco |
Wheat |
Rice |
Other |
Totals |
|
TOTAL NUMBER OF TRIALS |
3 881 |
1 242 |
1 088 |
782 |
723 |
654 |
394 |
308 |
232 |
189 |
1 610 |
11 105 |
United States and Canada |
2 749 |
826 |
770 |
552 |
407 |
494 |
118 |
194 |
190 |
102 |
1 087 |
7 489 |
Europe/New Zealand/ |
452 |
366 |
227 |
20 |
72 |
89 |
237 |
61 |
23 |
36 |
316 |
1 901 |
Transitional economies |
61 |
17 |
27 |
7 |
2 |
2 |
33 |
6 |
1 |
0 |
9 |
1 550 |
Developing countries |
619 |
33 |
64 |
203 |
242 |
69 |
6 |
47 |
18 |
51 |
198 |
1 550 |
PERCENTAGE OF ALL CROPS |
35 |
11 |
10 |
7 |
7 |
6 |
4 |
3 |
2 |
2 |
14 |
100 |
United States and Canada |
37 |
11 |
10 |
7 |
5 |
7 |
2 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
15 |
100 |
Europe/New Zealand/Australia/Japan |
24 |
19 |
12 |
1 |
4 |
5 |
13 |
3 |
1 |
2 |
17 |
100 |
Transitional economies |
37 |
10 |
16 |
4 |
1 |
1 |
20 |
4 |
1 |
0 |
6 |
100 |
Developing countries |
40 |
2 |
4 |
13 |
16 |
5 |
0 |
3 |
1 |
3 |
13 |
100 |
Source: Pray, Courtmanche and Govindasamy, 2002. |
||||||||||||
Transgenic crops were grown commercially in 18 countries on a total of 67.7 million ha in 2003, an increase from 2.8 million ha in 1996 (Figure 4). Although this overall rate of technology diffusion is impressive, it has been very uneven. Just six countries, four crops and two traits account for 99 percent of global transgenic crop production (Figures 5-7) (James, 2003).
The United States plants almost two-thirds of the transgenic crops grown worldwide. Although transgenic crop area in the United States continues to expand, its share of global transgenic area has fallen rapidly as Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China and South Africa have increased their plantings. The other 12 countries where transgenic crops were grown in 2003 have a combined share of less than 1 percent of the global total.
The most widely grown transgenic crops are soybeans, maize, cotton and canola. Herbicide tolerance and insect resistance are the most common traits. Herbicide-tolerant soybeans now comprise 55 percent of the global soybeans production area, and herbicide-tolerant canola comprises 16 percent of the global canola area. The transgenic cotton and maize varieties currently being grown commercially include traits for insect resistance, herbicide tolerance or both, and transgenic varieties now make up 21 percent and 11 percent, respectively, of the total area sown to those crops (James, 2003). The other transgenic crops being cultivated commercially include very small quantities of virus-resistant papaya and squash. Neither of the major food grains - wheat and rice - currently have transgenic varieties in commercial production anywhere in the world.
The changing locus of agricultural research from the public sector to the private transnational sector has had important implications for the types of products that are being developed and commercialized. Private-sector research naturally focuses on the crops and traits of commercial interest to farmers in higher-income countries where markets for agricultural inputs are robust and profitable. Agricultural public goods, including crops and traits of importance to subsistence farmers in marginal production environments, are of little interest to large transnational companies. Will farmers in developing countries be able to capture economic spillover benefits from the transgenic crops developed and commercialized by the private sector? What research priorities could more directly benefit the poor?
One of the lessons of the Green Revolution was that agricultural technology could be transferred internationally, especially to countries that had sufficient national agricultural research capacity to adapt the imported high-yielding cultivars to suit local production environments. What kind of research capacity do developing countries need to take advantage of the Gene Revolution? Given the dwindling resources available to public-sector research, how can more resources be mobilized for research for the poor? How can public-private partnerships be structured to capitalize on the strengths of each sector?
Unlike the high-yielding varieties disseminated in the Green Revolution, the products of the Gene Revolution are raising public concerns and encountering significant regulatory and market barriers. How do these issues influence the international transfer of new technologies? What policy measures are needed to facilitate the safe international movement of transgenic technologies?
The improved varieties that were responsible for the Green Revolution were disseminated freely as international public goods. Many of the innovations of the Gene Revolution, by contrast, are held under patents or exclusive licences. Although these intellectual property protections have greatly stimulated private-sector research in developed countries, they can restrict access to research tools for other researchers. What institutional mechanisms are needed to promote the sharing of intellectual property for public goods research?
The following section takes up these questions, examining the evidence so far regarding the economic (Chapter 4) and scientific (Chapter 5) issues surrounding transgenic crops and public concerns regarding their use (Chapter 6). The final section looks at the way forward in making biotechnology work for the poor.
1 Comprehensive data on field tests of all agricultural biotechnologies are not available. This section refers to transgenic crop trials only.
2 This data source counts each individual test plot as a separate trial, so the same GM event may have multiple trials in a given country.
