Peer-review: Yes - Open Access: Yes|http://science.thomsonreuters.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=MASTER&ISSN=0306-9192

Over the past decade the locus of agricultural research and development has shifted dramatically from the public to the private multinational sector. Three interrelated forces are transforming the system for supplying improved agricultural technologies to the world’s farmers. The first is the strengthened and evolving environment for protecting intellectual property in plant innovations. The second is the rapid pace of discovery and growth in importance of molecular biology and genetic engineering. Finally, agricultural input and output trade is becoming more open in nearly all countries. These developments have created a powerful new set of incentives for private research investment, altering the structure of the public/private agricultural research endeavor, particularly with respect to crop improvement. To understand the magnitude of private sector investment in agricultural research today, one need only look at its annual research budget relative to public research targeted to the developing country agriculture. The world’s top 10 multinational bioscience corporations’ collective annual expenditure on agricultural research and development is nearly three billion US dollars (Table 1). In comparison the CGIAR, which is the largest international public sector supplier of agricultural technologies, spends less than 300 million US dollars annually on plant improvement research and development. The largest public sector agricultural research programs in the developing world, those of Brazil, China, and India, have annual budgets of less than half a billion dollars each (Byerlee and Fischer, 2001). While there is more plant research being conducted today than at any time in history, the increased effort has not been evenly distributed geographically, or across crops. Commercially oriented producers in temperate zone countries continue to gain substantially from the increase in private sector research. This will create downward pressure on commodity prices. Purely subsistence producers, isolated from both input and output markets will be unaffected, but tropical producers with some marketed surplus in tropical countries are likely to lose due to low incentives for private sector research investments in their environments. Private sector investments in genomics and genetic engineering could be potentially very useful for addressing the problems faced by poor farmers, particularly those in the marginal environments. The question that needs to be asked is whether incentives exist, or can be created, for public/private sector partnerships that allow the public sector to use and adapt technologies developed by the private sector for the problems faced by the poor farmers, especially those growing non-commercial (orphan) crops. In a world in which the science required to generate improved technologies is becoming increasingly complex and expensive, the level of collaboration among public institutions, and between public and private institutions must increase from its low current level. In this paper we attempt to trace some of the broad trends in agricultural research and explore the implications of these changes for farmers and the poor in developing countries. We also attempt to understand the conditions under which partnerships can be created between private multinational companies and public agricultural research institutions.

Socioeconomics Program

Text in English

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CIMMYT Staff Publications Collection