Business Potential for Agricultural Biotechnology - Asian Productivity ...

7. COMMERCIALIZATION OF AGRICULTURAL CROP
BIOTECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS
INTRODUCTION
– 71 –
Dr. Paul S. Teng
Natural Science and Science Education AG
National Institute of Education
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore
One of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century has been the efforts of the global
agricultural research community to achieve food security through the phenomenal increase in
research-based crop and animal productivity that has fed millions and served as the basis of economic
transformation in many poor countries, especially in the south Asian subcontinent (Conway,
1998; Teng, Fischer, and Hossain, 1995). This “Green Revolution” has belied the dire
predictions of death and famine in Asia in the years following the Second World War. However,
Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug has estimated that to meet projected food demands by 2025,
average cereal yields must increase by 80% over 1990 figures (Borlaug and Doswell, 1999).
This formidable task—ensuring that food production is coupled with both poverty reduction and
environmental conservation—is made even more difficult because it will need to take into
account policies and actions to promote agriculture and rural development, an enabling regulatory
framework, fair trade, flexible and responsive institutions, increased investments in health
and education, especially for women, and access to credit, roads, marketing, and extension. The
development community has increasingly realized that new knowledge and products are necessary
but not sufficient conditions for sustainable agricultural development, just as food production
is a necessary but not sufficient condition for food security (Serageldin, 1999). Access to
and ability to apply technological advances will become important preconditions for increased
productivity, and in this, information technology and biotechnology will be key.
The greatest threat to sustaining food security and achieving real progress in alleviating
poverty and hunger is the continuous unchecked growth of population. Although there has been
notable progress in the reduction of fertility in Asia, particularly in countries which have made
significant economic progress, the number of consumers is currently increasing by 1.8% per year.
Population growth is the major driver in the food demand equation. Demographers now project
that the world’s population will double during the first half of the next century—from 5.3 billion
in 1990 to more than 10 billion by 2050 (United Nations Population Division, 1999). However,
underpinning the population growth figures is a more insidious phenomenon, viz., that there will
also be more people living in poverty, that most of the poor people in the world will live in Asia
and Africa, and that there will be more people living in “megacities” than in rural areas (Naisbitt,
1995). The World Bank estimated that in 1990, there were 1.3 billion people living below the
poverty line, of whom 65% were in Asia. Currently, most of these poor are rural, but Naisbitt’s
predictions sound loud alarm bells. Concomitant with the move to freer markets worldwide,
there will be fewer farmers to produce more per unit area, on less land with less water, to feed
growing urban populations.
Indeed, public concern about food has resurfaced in recent years, especially in Asia, after
what appeared to be a period of relative complacency following the success of the “Green Revolution.”
Poverty continues to limit access to food, leaving hundreds of millions of people in developing
countries undernourished. Improvement of the genetic material of crop plants and
maintenance of the natural resource base which sustains their productivity are the major means
of improving the welfare of poor people. In the developing world, people are not only the source