Module 2 - Biotechnology, Biosafety, and Agricultural Development

New techniques of biotechnology can stabilize yields and improve rural incomes, reduce negative environmental impacts, provide nutrient-enhanced and better quality food, and deliver vaccines and antibodies to improve human and animal health. While most benefits have occurred in industrial countries, the techniques have considerable potential for sustainable small-farm systems in developing countries. Yet some of these new technologies are controversial, owing to their potential environmental and health effects and socioeconomic implications. Experience so far has shown that biotechnology strategies must be country-specific, depending on needs and scientific capabilities. All countries, however, will need the capacity for developing technology policies and strategies, a strong regulatory framework, and scientific skills to make use of appropriate technologies.

Agricultural biotechnology is increasingly seen as a valuable tool for addressing production and nutritional constraints in developing countries, particularly in commodities important to poor producers and consumers. This view is supported in the World Bank’s rural strategy, Reaching the Rural Poor, which commits the Bank to helping developing countries assess and safely use new technologies. However, continuing controversy and debate over possible adverse health and environmental impacts, ethical and legal issues relating to IPRs, fears that access to certain markets will be restricted, and limited capacity and resources to comply with biosafety regulations have all slowed adoption in developing countries. To benefit from rapid global advances in the biological sciences, developing countries will have to invest public funds in products that are not of commercial interest to the private sector but are of high priority to their poor producers and consumers.

What Is Biotechnology?

“Agricultural biotechnology” encompasses a wide range of technologies and products that can improve the productivity or quality of crops, livestock, fisheries, and forests. The first-generation biotechnologies, including plant tissue culture and micropropagation techniques, molecular diagnostics of crop and livestock diseases, and embryo transfer in livestock, have already been adopted in many developing countries. They are simple to use, often inexpensive, and relatively free of regulatory requirements and public controversy.

The subsequent generation of biotechnology tools and products, based on molecular biology, is providing revolutionary advances in genetic knowledge and the capacity to change DNA. These molecular technologies can be used either as research tools to support plant and animal breeding (for example, through the use of genetic markers and gene mapping), or they can be used as a means of “precision breeding,” in which a gene conveying a specific trait (such as high vitamin A content or virus resistance) is transferred within or across species to generate transgenics (genetically modified organisms, commonly known as GMOs). These molecular approaches require advanced skills, research laboratories, and the capacity to manage intellectual property—requirements that may pose a constraint for developing countries. The transgenic crops developed using these techniques also require regulatory capacity to assess and manage possible environmental, health, and socioeconomic risks.