Policy Insights and Recommendations

In this short and final chapter, our aim is not to lay out detailed policy recommendations for different contexts and actors but rather to call attention to the broad underlying issues that can be used to frame policy. Evidently, the challenges related to catching up in biotechnology application in order to resolve the food crisis and poverty in those latecomer examined in this book are extremely complex and, sometimes, rather frightening. For instance, as we pointed out in the previous chapter, latecomers hold a mere 3% of all patents worldwide, 80% of these are in the hands of corporations and individuals in the highly industrialized countries and the world’s top five biotechnology firms control over 95% of gene transfer patents.1 Our data shows the evident connection between poverty and hunger: regions and groups that record the least income are the most severely penalized measured by those that suffer the most malnutrition and under-five mortality. These regions and/or groups tend also to be the most land-constrained and to have minimal access to education. The least progress in attaining the MDGs is recorded by the poorest regions of SSA and South Asia. Yet the vicious cycle of poverty equally forecloses the imperative of investment in what is most critical — the immediate need to commit resources to building innovation capacity through investment in scientific and engineering manpower and the construction of laboratory and industrial facilities in order to focus on urgent problems local food supply and disease.