Biotechnology offers great potential to contribute to sustainable agricultural growth, food security and poverty alleviation in developing countries. Yet there are economic and institutional constraints at national and international levels that inhibit the poor people's access to appropriate biotechnological innovations. Agricultural Biotechnology in Developing Countries: Towards Optimizing the Benefits for the Poor addresses the major constraints. Twenty-three chapters, written by a wide range of scholars and stake-holders, provide an up-to-date analysis of agricultural biotechnology developments in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Besides the expected economic and social impacts, the challenges for an adjustment of the international research structure are discussed, with a special focus on intellectual property rights and the roles of the main research organizations. Harnessing the comparative advantages of the public and private sectors through innovative partnerships is the only way forward to optimize the benefits of biotechnology for the poor. The book will be an invaluable resource for both academics and policy-makers concerned with agricultural biotechnology in context of developing-countries.

The product of research sponsored by the UK Department for International Development and a May 2000 workshop held in Rome, Italy, this book comprises 11 contributions from experts affiliated with the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (Rome, Italy) and the Institute for Plant Biology (U. of Zurich, Switzerland), and from academics in agriculture, food economics, law, and land economy affiliated with universities in the UK, US, and Italy. They investigate ways in which industrial changes implicit in new biotechnologies will affect modern agriculture; analyze industrial and distribution impacts, including consequences for developing countries; and look at genetic use restriction technologies and their implications for global agricultural production. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This book deals with the technologies that make the commodification of the genetic ("fourth") resource possible and it discusses how these technologies affect agriculture, especially in developing countries

Recent advances in gene technology, plant transformation, and the growing knowledge of DNA sequences of plants as well as of their most important parasites and symbionts offer many interesting prospects for the breeding of new crop varieties. This was not only recognized by the major seed companies, but also by the governments of developing countries and by worldwide foundations supporting their agriculture. The know-how gained by the seed companies on crops important for the agricultural industry in developed countries could easily be provided for free to the international and national organizations dedicated to development of crops important in the third world. Results obtained worldwide become easily available to everybody through the scientific literature. Likewise, agricultural research in, e.g., the USA or Europe profits from the natural plant gene pool available in the third world. All this definitely provides for the possibility of fast change, new prosperity and security of food supply in the whole world, if properly applied. The fast development also asks for ethical and sociopolitical considerations, whereby not doing the right can be as much a mistake as doing the wrong.

Crop biotechnology could boost global food production in a sustainable way. However, the economic repercussions of biotechnology for developing countries are largely unknown and have been the subject of acute controversy over the last few years. This study deals with the topic and provides some preliminary empirical results. An analytical framework for the ex ante evaluation of biotechnology in smallholder agriculture is developed, which is then used within three different case studies in Kenya and Mexico. It is shown that biotechnology holds great potentials for poor agricultural producers and consumers. Yet appropriate institutional adjustments are required to capitalize on these potentials. Implications for national and international biotechnology policies are discussed.