The International Laboratory for Tropical Agricultural Biotechnology (ILTAB) remains absolutely convinced that agricultural biotechnology has an essential role to play in the Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs).
The challenges facing the LDCs are daunting. Agricultural production must be doubled in the coming decades to meet nutritional needs and economic security for rapidly increasing populations and urbanisation within the developing nations. Biotechnology cannot answer this dilemma on its own but can be an important contributing factor in elevating crop yields and adding nutritional and economic value to agricultural products. To judge or dismiss the appropriateness of agricultural biotechnology to the LDCs solely on the basis of existing products such as herbicide resistant and Bt transgenic crops would be tragically narrowminded and premature. These first generation of transgenic crops were developed by scientists in the North specifically for release within the economic realities of the industrialised countries. They were never intended to address developing country requirements. Nevertheless, enthusiastic adoption of transgenic maize and soybean by farmers in countries such as Argentina and China show that they can be of significant relevance in some developing country scenarios.
Whether through mapping technologies, genetic transformation or micropropagation, or a combination of all three, we believe that biotechnology is in essence most appropriate to the LDC situation. This is because it can deliver improved germplasm for incorporation into conventional breeding programmes or, in other cases, for direct use by farmers. Unlike the Green Revolution, the improved performance need not be tied to agrochemical inputs because biotic and abiotic resistant traits and enhanced quality can be engineered into the plants genome by marker assisted breeding and/or genetic transformation. Recent reports are clearly demonstrating how biotechnology, when targeted at developing country crops, can indeed produce products with exciting and relevant potential. Some examples include a 30% yield increase in rice yields due to incorporation of enzymes from the photosynthetic pathway of maize, significantly increased phosphorus uptake in transgenic plants expressing a bacterial gene, nutritionally enhanced "golden" rice and bacterial resistance transferred directly by genetic engineering from wild rice to Chinese breeding and cultivated rice varieties. Discovery and isolation of a single gene from Arabidopsis which as a transgene can confer dwarfism in rice also promises great hope for elevated yields in the orphan crops like sorghum and millet. To dismiss these important advances and the benefits they, and future advances, could bring to the world's poorest people would be folly considering the scale of the requirement for crop yield improvement in the LDCs.
All such research and development will be irrelevant unless biotechnology is integrated more fully into crop improvement programmes in the LDCs. To achieve this will require the willingness of the public and private sectors within the industrialised countries to work in harness with policy makers, scientists, breeders, extension workers and farmers in the developing countries. intellectual property rights (IPR) issues are certainly a concern and must be resolved either at the individual level or through international agreements. The multinationals could be influential in this area by coming forward to offer relevant technologies within their portfolios for use in LDC food crops that do not constitute a market for the foreseeable future.
The large number of food and cash crops grown in the LDCs and the vast array of yield constraints which must be addressed constitute a challenge on a scale never before contemplated. Nevertheless, the lives of more that 80% of the world's people depend on these production systems. We have the resources and the technologies, both traditional and modern, to tackle these challenges. We should not dismiss any tool that can help.
Dr. C.M. Fauquet
Dr. N.J. Taylor
International Laboratory for Tropical Agricultural Biotechnology (ILTAB)
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
University of Missouri St Louis
Center for Molecular Electronic
8001 Natural Bridge Road
St Louis, MO 63121-4499
USA
Tel: 1 (314) 516 4581
Fax: 1 (314) 516-4582
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