Biotech giants spend $3bn annually on R&D

The world's top 10 transnational bioscience corporations spend annually nearly $ 3 billion on agricultural biotechnology research and development.

This is ten times the total amount spent on the research on all crops by the international research centres run by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

According to the annual report 2003-04 of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released at Rome recently, the total funding on global farm research by the CGIAR, the largest international public sector supplier of agricultural technologies, is only $300 million.

Developing nations, including countries like China and India which have the largest public sector agricultural research programmes in the Third World, spend less than half a billion dollars each annually on biotechnology research.

However, the benefits of biotechnology research remained confined to a few countries and the cultivators of even a fewer number of crops.

Six countries and four commercially important crops accounted for 99 per cent of the global area planted with transgenic crops in 2003.

The six countries were Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, South Africa and the US, with the four crops being maize, soyabean, canola (rapeseed) and cotton. Significantly, only insect resistance and herbicide tolerance had been tackled through the funded research so far.

But, though delivered through the private sector, the benefits of the biotech crops, wherever they have been cultivated, have been widely distributed among industry, farmers and consumers, the report stated.

"This suggests that the monopoly position engendered by intellectual property protection does not automatically lead to excessive industry profits", the report added.

On the whole, most developing countries were unable to adopt and adapt biotechnology innovations owing largely to the lack of agricultural research capacity, particularly in plant and animal breeding.

The other barriers that prevented the poor from accessing and gainfully exploiting the modern biotechnology included inadequate regulatory procedures, complex intellectual property issues and poorly functioning markets and seed delivery systems.

"Biotechnology, one of the tools of the gene revolution, is much more than genetically modified organisms (GMOs), sometimes also called transgenic organisms," it said.