Business Potential for Agricultural Biotechnology - Asian Productivity ...

Potential for Agri-biotechnology Products in India
As an interim measure, a special regulatory cell will be created by the DBT to build capacity
in the country for scientific risk assessment, monitoring, and management, to foster international
linkages, support biosafety research, obtain and review feedback from different stakeholders,
and provide support to industry and R&D institutions. This cell will have a solely promotional
and catalytic role.
Measures will be taken to build professionalism and competence in all agencies involved
with regulation of biotechnology products
Research in support of regulation to safeguard health and the environment shall be supported
by the concerned funding agencies to generate knowledge that will guide regulations and bioethics
policy.
Concerned ministries will make a vigorous effort to promote acceptance of the Indian regulatory
decisions by other trading countries.
CONCLUSION
The spectrum of biotechnology application in agriculture is very wide, encompassing
generation of improved crops, animals, and plants of agroforestry importance, microbes, the; use
of molecular markers to tag genes of interest, acceleration of breeding through marker-assisted
selection, fingerprinting of cultivars, land raises, and germplasm stocks, DNA-based diagnostics
for pests and pathogens of crops, farm animals, and fish, assessment and monitoring of biodiversity,
in vitro mass multiplication of elite planting material, embryo transfer technology for
animal breeding, and food and feed biotechnology. Plants and animals are being used for the
production of therapeutically or industrially useful products, with an emphasis on improving efficiency
and lowering the cost of production. However, the emphasis should not be placed on
edible vaccines, which are difficult to use in real-life conditions. Nutrition and balanced diet are
important health promotional strategies. Biotechnology has a critical role to play in developing
and processing value-added products of enhanced nutritive quality and providing tools for
ensuring and monitoring food quality and safety.
It has been estimated that if biofertilizers were used to substitute for only 25% of chemical
fertilizers on 50% of India’s crops, 235,000 million tons would be used. Today about 13,000
million tons of biofertilizers are used—only 0.36% of the total fertilizer use. The projected production
target by 2011 is around 50,000 million tons. Biopesticides have fared slightly better,
with a 2.5% share of the total pesticide market of 2,700 crores and an annual growth rate of
10%–15%. Despite the obvious advantages, several constraints have limited their wider usage:
products of inconsistent quality, short shelf life, and sensitivity to drought, temperature, and
agronomic conditions.
From a research perspective, the spectrum of organisms studied has been rather narrow, and
testing has been limited in scale, restricted mainly to agronomic parameters. Environmental factors,
such as survival in the rhizosphere/phyllosphere and competition of native microbes, have
not received sufficient attention. Moreover, results on crops are slow to manifest. Unless there is
a policy initiative at the center and the state to actively promote biofertilizers and biopesticides
at a faster pace, there is unlikely to be a quantum increase in their use.
A task force headed by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan under the Ministry of Agriculture (2004) has
prepared a detailed framework on the application of biotechnology in agriculture that rightly emphasizes
the judicious use of biotechnologies for the economic well-being of farm families, the
food security of the nation, the health security of the consumer, protection of the environment,
and the security of national and international trade in farm commodities. Consistent with this
overall vision, the priorities in agri-biotech would be based on social, economic, ecological, ethical,
and gender equity issues. The following guiding principles would apply across the sector:
– 109 –