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Even in sub-Saharan Africa's most progressive nations, agbiotech partnerships are still often poorly oriented to end users, fragmented in scope and of limited impact in achieving the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals.

Agricultural biotechnology is typically analyzed critically by means of a political ecological focus on the science and its ecological implications – agbio science as a radical, and ‘non-natural’, break with ‘normal’ trajectories for ‘new plant science’. Surprisingly, less attention has been paid to a range of key political economic issues, many of which were important in the last big food production technology ‘revolution’, the Green Revolution. This paper will focus on three areas of political economy. First, we discuss the corporate drivers of agricultural biotechnology, and examine whether these drivers have already set the technology so that it cannot be changed. Second, we investigate the present economics and technology of genetic modification in plants, and its possible future. Third, we examine empirical evidence for alternative visions of the technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do corporations develop technologies which can be associated with the generation of various environmental risks and how are the technologies that they develop governed by factors within and around firms? The authors examine the factors that have motivated and guided technological innovation, based on an examination of multinational companies developing genetically modified (GM) crops for the European market. The analysis is based on an inherently interdisciplinary approach to the study of innovation, which incorporates factors that are governed endogenously through the processes within companies (that is, strategic decisionmaking) and exogenously through interactions between firms and their external constituents (that is, government policies and regulations, and stakeholder and public perspectives and engagements). It is found that the introduction of GM technologies in Europe has been shaped significantly by public perception and societal reactions. It is also found that the aspects of industry strategies which contributed most to the course of European public opposition to GM crops were: (a) the choice of first-generation GM products; (b) interactions between pesticide-product and biotechnology-product strategies in different companies, and industry's efforts to present their sector and its products as contributing to sustainable development; (c) cultural and world-view differences between companies; and (d) company responses to European biotechnology policies and risk regulation. It is demonstrated that actions which seem rational to individual actors (corporations, governments, public interest groups) can have counterintuitive, and often counterproductive, outcomes in the longer term and when considered from the perspective of interactions within broader governance processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the management of agriculture and food-related biotechnology. Issue of firm management; Importance of technology in the operation; Advantage of biotechnology firms.

Examines the status of biotechnology-based innovations in Europe. Applications of biotechnology in agricultural and food-related industries; Existence of revolutionary techno-economic paradigm shifts; Motivations underlying the statements about the revolutionary nature of biotechnology.

Science and technology -- and particularly biotechnology -- is increasingly central to development agendas in Africa and elsewhere. Implicit within the centrality of science and technology lie a set of policy issues regarding how best to shape contextually appropriate, innovative and sustainable science and technological products in, with and for developing countries. The work of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a case in point and we draw our empirical material from the evolution of two biotech bovine vaccine development programmes housed in a CG Centre. In the paper, we seek to show that broadening our understanding of scientific 'excellence' can lead to more innovative, systemic research that may produce more appropriate technological solutions. We believe this has key implications for science policy, development policy and the practice of science for development itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent academic and policy debate on innovation indicates that there has been some shift from a more traditional systems approach to ecologies and ecosystems. The latter are concepts transferred from the world of biology to the social world in order to explain the evolutionary nature of interrelations between different individuals, their innovative activities, and their environment. We evaluate the concept of knowledge ecology and the theory of innovation ecosystem on two fundamental grounds; firstly, on the grounds of theoretical plausibility and conceptual consistency; secondly, on empirical grounds of the case of public-private interrelations of biotech innovation in Cambridge. The argument is that the concept of knowledge ecology and the theory of innovation ecosystems can lead to problems of reductionism and functionalism. This is due to their development in abstraction from more grounded analysis of historical processes of the social division of labour. Knowledge and innovation need to be looked at in the context of historically founded processes of socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]