www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

The past four decades have seen two waves of agricultural technology
development and diffusion to developing countries, November 2005 by Prabhu
Pingali and Terri Raney.

The first wave was initiated by the Green Revolution in which improved
germplasm was made available to developing countries as a public good
through an explicit strategy for technology development and diffusion.

The second wave was generated by the Gene Revolution in which a global and
largely private agricultural research system is creating improved
agricultural technologies that are flowing to developing countries primarily
through market transactions.

Asymmetries between developed and developing countries in research capacity,
market institutions and the commercial viability of technologies raise
doubts regarding the potential of the Gene Revolution to generate benefits
for poor farmers in poor countries.

The Green Revolution was responsible for an extraordinary period of growth
in food crop productivity in the developing world over the last forty years.
Productivity growth has been significant for rice in Asia, wheat in
irrigated and favorable production environments worldwide and maize in
Mesoamerica and selected parts of Africa and Asia. A combination of high
rates of investment in crop research, infrastructure and market development,
and appropriate policy support fueled this land productivity. These elements
of a Green Revolution strategy improved productivity growth despite
increasing land scarcity and high land values (Pingali and Heisey, 2001).

The transformation of global food production systems defied conventional
wisdom that agricultural technology does not travel well because it is
either agro-climatically 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 agro-climatic
boundaries can be captured. Hence the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was established specifically to generate
spillovers particularly for nations 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?

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 (Pingali and Traxler, 2002).

Developing countries are facing increasing transactions costs in access to
and use of technologies generated by the multinational sector. Existing
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 which preserves the
incentives for private sector innovation while at the same time meeting the
needs of poor farmers in the developing world.

For a detailed look into the report, please visit the FAO website
www.fao.org or click on the link below for a PDF version of the report.

[www.fao.org]

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