The growth of private investment in developing-country agriculture, new advances in the biological sciences, and rapid integration of developing countries into the global trading system has heightened interest in the topic of seed market and intellectual property rights’ (IPRs) policies among public policy-makers, corporate decision-makers and other actors in the agricultural sector. But there are still unanswered questions about whether emerging and evolving seed policy reforms and IPR regimes in developing countries will contribute to increasing crop productivity and improving food security. This paper attempts to answer some of these questions by focusing specifically on the case of India, the regional leader in implementing seed policy reforms and IPRs in agriculture. Findings indicate that maize and pearl millet yields grew significantly during the last two decades due partly to the combination of (1) public policies that encouraged private investment in India’s seed industry during the 1980s, and (2) biological IPRs conferred by hybridisation that conveniently married the private sector’s need for appropriability with the nation’s need for productivity growth. Although past lessons are not an indication of future success, this convergence of policy solutions and technology opportunities can be replicated for other crops that are vital to India’s food security. The Renewable Energy Source Act (EEG) promotes German biogas production in order to substitute fossil fuels, protect the environment, and prevent climate change. As a consequence, green maize production has increased significantly over the last years, causing negative environmental effects on soil, water and biodiversity. In this paper we quantitatively analyse the EEG-reform in 2012 by applying the simulation tool ReSI-M (Regionalised Location Information System – Maize). Comparing the EEG 2012 with a former version of the legislation, results imply that the reform contributes to an expansion of biogas electricity generation compared to former versions, and thus to substitution of fossil fuels. Furthermore, given a restriction in the share of green maize input, its production is reduced and the crop-mix is diversified. However, since maize provides the highest energy output per area, total land requirement for biogas production increases. An alternative analysis shows that an EEG with tariffs independent from plant-types would provide the highest subsidy-efficiency, but slightly lower land efficiency compared to the EEG 2012. A year-long project involving more than 65 researchers has culminated with a panel of economists including four Nobel laureates identifying the smartest ways to allocate money to respond to ten of the world’s biggest challenges. The Copenhagen Consensus 2012 Expert Panel finds that fighting malnourishment should be the top priority for policymakers and philanthropists. Nobel laureate economist Vernon Smith said: “One of the most compelling investments is to get nutrients to the world’s undernourished. The benefits from doing so – in terms of increased health, schooling, and productivity – are tremendous.” New research by John Hoddinott et al. of the International Food Policy Research Institute shows that for just $100 per child, interventions including micronutrient provision, complementary foods, treatments for worms and diarrheal diseases, and behavior change programs, could reduce chronic undernutrition by 36 percent in developing countries. This paper evaluates the potential impact of adoption of improved legume technologies on rural household welfare measured by consumption expenditure in rural Ethiopia and Tanzania. The study utilizes cross-sectional farm household level data collected in 2008 from a randomly selected sample of 1313 households (700 in Ethiopia and 613 in Tanzania). The causal impact of technology adoption is estimated by utilizing endogenous switching regression. This helps us estimate the true welfare effect of technology adoption by controlling for the role of selection problem on production and adoption decisions. Our analysis reveals that adoption of improved agricultural technologies has a significant positive impact consumption expenditure (in per adult equivalent terms) in rural Ethiopia and Tanzania. This confirms the potential role of technology adoption in improving rural household welfare as higher consumption expenditure from improved technologies translate into lower poverty, higher food security and greater ability to withstand risk. An analysis of the determinants of adoption highlighted inadequate local supply of seed, access to information and perception about the new cultivars as key constraints for technology adoption. 
Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is an important cause of blindness and premature death. Red palm oil (RPO) is the richest food source of VA-forming carotenoids. RPO carotenoid concentration and bioavailability were evaluated and this data used to estimate the amount of RPO needed to meet VA requirements. Amounts ranged from 6.7 to 29.2 g/d (1.5 to 6.5 tsp/d), which are easily consumed. The amount of RPO needed to supply recommended dietary intakes of VA for all 208100000 individuals most in danger for VAD worldwide for 1 y is 0.80 million metric tons, a fraction of annual world palm oil production. Despite its abundance, RPO has seldom been used for VAD prevention on a national level. Pareto charts were constructed to highlight the variables that influence the ability of RPO to prevent VAD on the national level. The most important variable by far was refining method. Most refining methods are designed to remove color and flavor from RPO, resulting in a bland product that lacks carotenoids. Thus, the important barriers to the use of RPO as a food-based intervention to prevent VAD appear to be that: (1) RPO requires refining, limiting its profitability and availability for small farmers. (2) The goal of most refining methods is to create a low-cost bland, odorless, and colorless fat which requires removal of carotenoids. (3) Cost, since RPO use competes with high-dose VA supplements, which are heavily subsidized. It appears that RPO could prevent VAD in many food-deficit countries if carotenoids were conserved during oil refining, and costs were low enough to make it an attractive alternative to nutritional supplements. 
The transmission of foodborne pathogens may be impacted by the effects of climate change, according to a report released March 28 by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Studying hundreds of peer-reviewed publications on six different food- and waterborne pathogens, the report's authors observed 1,653 "key facts" that link the viability of those pathogens to a range of climatic variables such as air temperature, water temperature and precipitation. The pathogens under study included Campylobacter, Listeria, Salmonella, Norovirus, Cryptosporidium and non-cholera Vibrio. Campylobacter, the most prevalent foodborne pathogen in Europe, shows a strong seasonal variability, leading researchers to believe its peak infection rates may rise or shift in response to rising global air and water temperatures. Salmonella infection rates were also strongly associated with air temperature. But the authors also noted that despite its connection to seasonal changes in temperature, Salmonella infections have declined in Europe in the last decade, likely in part due to ramped up public health efforts. The decline gives the authors hope that any effects of climate change on foodborne illness might be counteracted with carefully implemented health promotion and food safety policies. Cryptosporidium outbreaks may be linked to rainfall events, though the connection varies by region. On the other hand, seasonal variations showed little effect on Listeria, likely due to the bacteria being more temperature resistant than others such as Salmonella and E. coli. A lack of published information on Norovirus makes any link between it and climate variations tenuous, while the authors found a strong association between rising water temperatures and extended summer season with non-cholera Vibrio inefections -- though the bacteria accounts for relatively few infections in Europe to begin with. The authors noted in their conclusion that each of the six pathogens under study showed some type of relationship with climate variations, though Campylobacter and Salmonella demonstrated the strongest associations. The report was limited to peer-reviewed literature written in English and German, and was also limited by the information available on each pathogen. This study assessed the cost-effectiveness of community-based management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) to prevent deaths due to severe acute malnutrition among children under-five. The analysis used a decision tree model to compare the costs and effects of two options to treat severe acute malnutrition: existing health services with CMAM vs existing health services without CMAM. The model used outcome and cost data from a CMAM programme in Dowa district, Malawi and a set of key assumptions regarding treatment-seeking behaviour and mortality outcomes. Under our ‘base case’ scenario, we found that CMAM cost US$42 per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted (2007 US$) and US$493 per DALY averted under an assumed ‘worst case’ scenario for each variable. The results suggest that CMAM was highly cost-effective in the ‘base case’ as defined by the World Health Organization, as the cost per DALY falls well below Malawi’s 2007 gross national income (GNI) per capita of US$250, and is within the range of DALYs reported for other child health interventions. Under a hypothetical ‘worst case’ for all variables, the model indicates CMAM is still cost-effective. The results indicate the decision to scale-up CMAM within essential health services in Dowa was a cost-effective one and that scaling up CMAM in similar contexts is also likely to be cost-effective. However, several contextual and programmatic factors should be considered when generalizing to diverse contexts. 
This paper evaluates the ex post impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties on crop income and poverty in rural Uganda. The study utilizes cross-sectional data of 927 households, collected in 2006, from seven districts in Uganda. Using propensity score matching methods, we find that adopting improved groundnut varieties (technology) significantly increases crop income and reduces poverty. The positive and significant impact on crop income is consistent with the perceived role of new agricultural technologies in reducing rural poverty through increased farm household income. This study supports broader investment in agriculture research to address vital development challenges. Reaching the poor with better technologies however requires policy support for improving extension efforts, access to seeds and market outlets that simulate adoption. 
The Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture (PIPRA) was founded in 2004 by the Rockefeller Foundation in response to concerns that public investments in agricultural biotechnology benefiting developing countries were facing delays, high transaction costs and lack of access to important technologies due to intellectual property right (IPR) issues. From its inception, PIPRA has worked broadly to support a wide range of research in the public sector, in specialty and minor acreage crops as well as crops important to food security in developing countries. In this paper, we review PIPRA’s work, discussing the failures, successes, and lessons learned during its years of operation. To address public sector’s limited freedom-to-operate, or legal access to third-party rights, in the area of plant transformation, we describe PIPRA’s patent ‘pool’ approach to develop open-access technologies for plant transformation which consolidate patent and tangible property rights in marker-free vector systems. The plant transformation system has been licensed and deployed for both commercial and humanitarian applications in the United States (US) and Africa, respectively. 
The Japanese government has granted approval for the commercial shipments of genetically modified ‘Rainbow’ papaya from Hawaii, according to a USDA Foreign Agricultural Service report. “This announcement marks the end of a long process that began back in 1999, and the beginning of a new chapter for Hawaiian papaya growers,” the report stated. “The approval of Rainbow papaya is significant because it is the first horticultural biotech product and the first direct-to-consumer food product to gain regulatory approval in Japan.” The report continues on to state that at its peak in 1996 Hawaii shipped nearly US$15m worth of conventional papaya to Japan. During the past decade, cotton prices remained considerably below other agricultural prices (although they recovered toward the end of 2010). Yet, between 2000-04 and 2005-09 world cotton production increased 13 percent. This paper conjectures that biotechnology-induced productivity improvements increased supplies by China and India, which, in addition to keeping cotton prices low, aided these countries to cap-ture market share from (and cause losses to) non-users of biotechnology. By contrast, with a single exception, Africa has not adopted biotechnology and, not coincidentally, its cotton output declined by more than 20 percent between the first and second half of the past decade. The paper concludes that the development implications of biotechnology go beyond cotton and Africa. High energy prices have been an important driver of the recent commodity price boom. Therefore, investment and policy strategy responses to a cost-driven boom should be consistent with cost-saving alternatives. Biotechnology clearly meets this challenge. 
The introduction of genetically modified (Bt) cotton in 2002 helped push India to the rank of second-largest global producer. However, this has also led to a decline in output of premium quality cotton. “Bt has really helped certain varieties (long staple) of cotton. But, the output of other varieties, including extra long staple (ELS) and short staple (SS), has declined over the years since farmers switched to the high-yielding Bt crop,” said A B Joshi, commissioner in the Union ministry of textiles. 
A research team led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) has developed three new varieties of vitamin A cassava that could improve the livelihoods of millions of farmers in Africa and help put an end to malnutrition due to vitamin A deficiency in the continent. The vitamin A cassava varieties... have high beta carotene (pro-vitamin A) and are suitable for food uses... The yellow root color of the vitamin A-rich varieties are products of over 20 years of breeding efforts for improved nutritional quality using traditional breeding methods involving hybridization and selection of cassava seedlings followed by clonal propagation of the selected desirable plants. Drs. Peter Kulakow and Norbert Maroya, IITA Cassava Breeders, said, “The development of these varieties is a major breakthrough that will change the nutritional status of people living on cassava-based food.” Known for its high carbohydrate content, cassava is the fourth largest staple after wheat, maize, and rice consumed in the developing countries, with over 200 million people in sub-Saharan Africa relying on the crop for over half of their daily food energy. The biofortification of cassava with pro-vitamin A provides a cost-effective way of combating vitamin A deficiency in the region where millions are malnourished and many people live on less than $1 per day. |
In the case of Triffid flax the EU did not examine the existing scientific evidence – and evidence does exist because Triffid was approved in both Canada and the US, and it did not undertake a risk assessment prior to putting the ban in place. The EU did not formally invoke the precaution clause in the SPS – as it did not examine the scientific evidence – and has not actively sought to gather the scientific information required for a formal scientific-based decision. Thus, the EU policy on LLP for non-authorized GM organisms and products does not appear to be consistent with EU SPS commitments and it is open to a WTO challenge. While considerable attention has been given to the EU’s policy for approving new GM organisms and products, as the Triffid flax incident illustrates, the EU policy on LLP can also lead to disruptions to international trade and impose considerable costs. Thus, this facet of trade policy should not be ignored by policy makers. 
Poverty is a major factor in undernourishment. However, poor households may have enough food, while those that are above the poverty line may not. This is the paradox revealed by research in Mali. In 2010, 16% of people in developing countries were undernourished; way above the 10% target set by the Millennium Development Goals. This poor result calls into question food security policies, which are often based on macroeconomic indicators. Using household surveys, a research study on Mali confirms that poverty is an important factor of hunger, but it also highlights certain paradoxes: poor households may have enough food, while those that are above the poverty line may not. It explains these paradoxes by identifying other factors influencing the food situation, such as household size, budget constraints, food preferences, and social obligations. Taking these additional factors into account helps to more accurately characterise undernourished populations and to better target action. Leading economists have ranked how to best and most cost-effectively invest to solve many of the world's seemingly insurmountable problems, a Danish think-tank said Monday, calling for a shift in global priorities. "It may not sound sexy, but solving the problems of diarrhoea, worms and malnutrition will do good for more of the world's poor than other more grandiose interventions," Bjoern Lomborg, who heads the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, said in a statement. His think-tank on Monday presented the results of its third global Copenhagen Consensus, in which it asked prominent economists working within 10 of the world's top problem fields to propose the best investments to fix those problems. A panel of experts, including four Nobel laureates, then went through the proposals and ranked the ones they believed would have the biggest impact and "where we can get the most mileage for our money," Lomborg told AFP. 
We assess the impacts of the Malawian Farm Input Subsidy Program on manure use at the farm plot level using more than 3,000 farm plot observations from six districts in central and southern Malawi over three years (2006, 2007, and 2009). The probabilities and intensities of manure use were investigated with the correlated random effects (CRE) probit and tobit models. The endogeneity of access to fertilizer subsidies and fertilizer use intensity was controlled for with a control function approach. Both the probability of manure use and intensity of manure use were positively correlated with the intensity of fertilizer use. A 1% increase in fertilizer use intensity is associated with a 1.94%–1.96% increase in the intensity of manure use outside the subsidy program and a 0.62%–1.66% increase in manure use with the subsidy program. A 1% increase in average fertilizer price was associated with a 0.43%–0.76% increase in the probability of manure use and a 3.5%–5.3% increase in the intensity of manure use. Innovation in technologies that promote mitigation and adaptation will be critical for tackling climate change. It can decrease the costs of policy measures and provide new opportunities for the private sector. However, most discussions of innovation have focused on mitigation, while little attention has been paid to innovation for adaptation. This paper uses agricultural crop biotechnology as a case study of innovative activity. The agricultural sector is considered to be particularly vulnerable to climate change, in addition to facing the pressures of meeting the demands of a rising world population. Innovation in plant breeding to develop crop varieties that are more resilient to climate change impacts is one of several possible adaptation options for agriculture. This paper neither advocates nor discourages the use of biotechnology, but focuses on providing estimates of the level and trends of innovation in this field. 
How is it that the world's most popular fizzy drink reaches even the farthest-flung corners of the planet, yet vast numbers of children in developing countries die for lack of one of the cheapest and most effective preparations known to medical science? The world's second-biggest cause of child mortality, diarrhoea, kills about 1.5 million children every year. Three-quarters of these deaths could be prevented with a simple course of oral rehydration salts (ORS) combined with zinc tablets, at a cost of just US$0.50 per patient. Yet, despite being heavily promoted by the World Health Organization since the 1970s, fewer than 40 percent of child diarrhoea cases in developing countries are treated with ORS. That figure falls below 1 percent when the treatment includes zinc, which reduces not only the duration and severity of diarrhoeal episodes but also the likelihood of subsequent infections. 
Nobel prize winning Indian economist Amartya Sen is awarded the prestigious US National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. Prof Sen was awarded the medal for "his insights into the causes of poverty, famine, and injustice", Mr Obama said. 
Despite the technical knowledge available for improving food security in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), only three African countries (South Africa, Egypt and Burkina Faso) have commercialized biotech crops to date1. An important step toward improving agbiotech development and genetically modified (GM) crop adoption is to understand the factors that affect the transition of new agbiotech products from the product development stage, through commercialization to the hands of farmers and ultimate consumption by the population. As part of a broader study on a social audit preparation for the Water Efficient Maize for Africa Project, we conducted 91 interviews with agbiotech stakeholders from a diverse range of groups within five SSA countries (Supplementary Methods). Analysis of the recordings of these interviews revealed four recurring factors that appear to influence agbiotech development in SSA: communication, culture and religion, capacity building and commercialization (Fig. 1). We expand in more detail on these factors below. This paper describes the results of a literature survey to determine the most common methods of analysis and measures of data location employed in journal papers that explore the agronomic and economic differences between genetically modified (GM) and non-GM crop varieties. A total of 108 articles were reviewed and the most common measure of location employed was the arithmetic mean. Only a small minority of articles employed the median or stated that the data had been tested for normality. Yet the choice of measure of location can make a difference in terms of presenting differences between GM and non-GM to a readership. This is illustrated using data from one of the first field-level studies of GM crops in Africa (GM cotton in Makhathini Flats, South Africa), where the median actually gave a greater percentage yield advantage for GM over non-GM cotton than did the mean. However while the median could be justified in statistical terms this could be a source of suspicion amongst those who are opponents of GM. For the last 15 years, genetically engineered (GE) crops have been grown on an ever increasing area worldwide, reaching 148 million hectares in 2010. The majority of these crops carry genes that provide resistance against specific herbicides or certain insect pests, or both properties. Compared to the global area of biotech crops, Europe is playing a minor role with less than 100,000 hectares of insect resistant maize (mostly in Spain) and less than 250 hectares of potato with modified starch production (in Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic) in 2010. Insect-resistance in commercial GE plants is achieved by the insertion of genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that encode for the production of insecticidal crystal (Cry) or vegetative (Vip) proteins, which in turn cause the mortality of target pests. Microbial Bt products have a long history of safe use as insecticides mainly in organic agriculture because of their narrow spectrum of activity. The most important crop transformed with Bt genes is maize. In the European Union, Spain has been leading commercial production of Bt maize. Portugal, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania follow with much smaller areas. In this article, the authors present the major pests in European maize production, how they are controlled in conventional agriculture, benefits and limitations of growing Bt maize, and what role Bt maize can play in integrated pest management (IPM) systems. Bt maize is a highly specific and highly efficient pest control measure that allows growers to produce high quality grain with reduced insecticide inputs and fewer farm operations. Despite higher seed prices and administrative requirements to fulfil licence agreements, Bt maize growers in areas with high pest pressure have generally been able to increase their gross margin considerably. In consequence, the non-authorisation of Bt maize results in foregoing economic benefits for growers in several European countries. Whenever Bt maize replaces broad spectrum insecticides, ecological benefits are evident because valued non-target organisms remain unaffected. However, potential increases in populations of secondary pests and resistance evolution in populations of target pests are risks for the sustainability of Bt maize that require appropriate management plans (refuges, enhancement of natural enemies) and close monitoring. In an IPM context, Bt maize is one highly specific tool, which efficiently solves the main pest problem and allows combination with other preventive or responsive measures to solve problems including biological control of other maize pests. This paper reviews four international datasets and one regional dataset which allow us to consider the magnitude of and trends in government spending on, official development assistance (ODA) to and foreign direct investment (FDI) in agriculture, forestry and fishing and, in some cases, other relevant sectors. These datasets represent the most current and comprehensive data available on resource flows to agriculture. Two of the datasets have not yet been made freely available to the public. Although the existing data do not permit consideration of several important issues, they do allow us to better understand trends in resource flows to agriculture and we are able to draw some conclusions including the following. Spending on agriculture is mainly financed through domestic sources of finance (levels of government spending are larger than ODA and FDI). For developing countries as a whole, the three types of spending on agriculture (total levels and levels per population working in agriculture) have increased. Although increases have been recorded for FDI, we find some evidence that FDI may have increased less than previously claimed. Trends in indicators of government spending on, ODA to and FDI in agriculture are discouraging for Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper concludes with suggestions of areas for future research. 
Just two genetically-modified crops have ever been approved for cultivation in Europe. In comparison, the USA has 90 approved GM crops. At the heart of those striking differences lies European politics. For a GM crop to be grown in Europe, a qualified majority of the 27 member states has to approve its use, following a positive European Food Standards Authority assessment that the risk to human health or the environment is acceptable. But almost regardless of the assessment presented by EFSA, many member states vote on political, rather than scientific grounds. That has resulted in political stalemate, where GM traits neither get approved nor rejected, and seemingly spend an eternity being passed back and forth in the system. The issue was always political rather than scientific, admits Ladislav Miko, deputy director general for the food chain within the European Commission's Health and Consumers Directorate General. Member states used requests for additional scientific studies to effectively stymie progress, in the absence of a legal framework that allowed rejection on political grounds, he explains. "But it was quite clear there were not only scientific worries." That was paralysing the system, he says. "And it was clear it could carry on more or less without limitation." But in 2008, the member states unanimously asked for a system that allowed them to opt in or out of growing GM crops. The European Commission responded by formulating an amendment to the approval legislation, in which member states can effectively ban cultivation of approved GM crops at a national level. "The idea of the Commission was to keep the risk assessment very thorough, strict and precise at the European level. Then when it is approved, the citizen can be confident that it is safe. But at the same time to allow member states to opt out of growing it for other than risk-related reasons," |
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