VISION
News & Views
December 1999
Biotechnology for Developing-Country Agriculture
The public debate about biotechnology in agriculture has been replete with competing, seemingly unbridgeable claims. To sort through the key issues and bring some perspective to the debate as it affects developing countries, the 2020 Vision initiative has published a set of 10 briefs, the second in its Focus series, entitled Biotechnology for Developing-Country Agriculture: Problems and Opportunities. Edited by Gabrielle J. Persley, an adviser to the World Bank on biotechnology, the collection of briefs covers a wide range of topics, including food and nutrition issues, animal vaccine development, the role of the private sector, risk and safety issues, intellectual property management, research management, and policy issues. The authors in this collection come from research and scientific communities in academia, the private sector, and international organizations.To launch the publication of these briefs, the 2020 Vision initiative held a panel discussion on October 18 that featured Richard Flavell, chief scientific officer at Ceres, Inc.; Anatole Krattiger, executive director of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications; Peter Hazell, director of IFPRI’s Environment and Production Technology Division; and Persley.
The panelists agreed that biotechnology offers important opportunities for meeting the food and nutrition needs of the world’s poor. But they also warned that the opportunities for each country must be examined carefully, that food and environmental safety issues must be analyzed for each specific application and product, and that public perception issues must be addressed seriously in every country.
Given that biotechnology promises a great deal technologically, to what extent should developing countries increase their use of this tool? The briefs suggest that to answer this question, policymakers must identify the problems currently constraining agricultural productivity or damaging the environment, assess whether biotechnology may help solve these problems, and prioritize solutions with pro-poor outcomes in mind. In this necessary strategic exercise, perceptions of risks and benefits invariably will differ according to cultural and political economy contexts. As Flavell argued during his panel presentation, “We in the U.S. and Europe should not be making decisions about benefits and risks in other societies that have very different needs and priorities.”
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