PLANT BIOTECHNOLOGY: PERSPECTIVES FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES BETWEEN 2002 AND 2025

In the first 30 years of the 3rd millennium, the global demand for food will double. In order to produce enough food and to ensure good harvests, farmers everywhere in the world need a reliable source of good-quality seed. Access to improved seeds, adapted to local conditions, will be the key to achieving sustained intensification of food production. Crop improvement by means of biotechnology has now become a reality. The "globalisation of biotechnology" is underway. Although the potential of biotechnology is now quite well known, and indeed was advocated in Agenda 21 as early as 1992, progress in the development, realization and utilization of genetically modified crops in many developing countries is far too slow. By reorganizing plant DNA resources, it will be possible to improve the carrying capacity of the Earth. Innovative and vigorous forms of public-private collaboration are required if the benefits of modern biotechnology are to be brought to all of the world's people; incentives are needed to encourage commercial research companies to share with the public sector more of their capacity for innovation. "Making New Technologies Work for Human Development" [1] will be a sustainable guideline for responsible people shaping our future, because: "Mankind is at the Crossroads".

Keywords
food, transgenic plants, functional genomics, biotechnology strategy, scientific apartheid, technology transfer, private-public partnership