POLICY AND PARTNERSHIPS FOR AGRICULTURAL BIOTECHNOLOGY RESEARCH 193


Insights from Next Harvest


A key finding of the 2004 Next Harvest study was that public research institu- tions in developing countries have conducted a significant number of diverse crop transformations to express a wide variety of crop groups and transgenes.3 However, although relatively large numbers of products were recorded in Asia and Latin America, the only African countries with any significant number of transformations were Egypt and South Africa. The situation has not changed substantially over the past 5 years, although a few countries have been added to the set of countries developing these technologies.


PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT


When classified by crop type, more than half (55 percent) of all public trans- formations recorded by the Next Harvest study were concentrated among 15 crops that are critical to achieving sustainable food security and reducing poverty in developing countries. The remaining 45 percent of products were focused on cotton, vegetables, and fruits—crops of a more commercial nature. For Africa, the predominant crop group in all 54 products was cereals, fol- lowed by vegetables, roots and tubers, and sugar, with each group representing a fairly diverse set of crop species. The greatest numbers of products among all 11 crops were for maize (17.0 percent), potatoes (13.0 percent), and sugar and tomatoes (11.0 percent each). With regard to regulatory progress, most of these products remained


confined to the experimental stage of laboratory and greenhouse trials; fewer have advanced to later stages in the regulatory process, such as field trials for biosafety testing, scaling-up for wider environmental and efficacy testing; or commercialization for release to farmers. Overall, African coun- tries lagged slightly behind their Asian and Latin American counterparts: whereas 70 percent of all products in the African countries surveyed were still at the experimental stage, only 60 percent were at a similar stage in Asia and Latin America.


MAIN RESEARCH ACTORS


Most of the surveyed public organizations worked in isolation from other research actors, both public and private. In the study, only 7 percent of trans- formation products generated by these organizations were conducted in col- laboration with the private sector, and only 22 percent were generated in


3 Findings based on data from the Next Harvest survey are reported in Atanassov et al. (2004); Sithole-Niang, Cohen, and Zambrano (2004); Cohen (2005); and Spielman, Cohen, and Zambrano (2006a,b). However, the findings presented here update these findings with additional analysis of the data and offer new insights from more recent research.


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