Introduction

In the next three chapters, we will take a critical look at the past performance and future prospects of that putative emblem of twenty-first century agriculture: namely agbiotech. In Part 1, we saw how this technology has come to dominate the thinking of many scientists, business people, policymakers, and others with an interest in plant breeding. The technology helped to spawn a dramatic resurgence of private sector interest in the commercial exploitation of crop breeding. But are the revolutionary claims of the agbiotech boosters really justified, or is this just another technology that has been artificially assisted by a fortuitous congruence of favourable patent protection and an ongoing decline in public sector breeding? Is the current agbiotech paradigm really a globally appropriate method of crop improvement? And are agbiotech strategies entitled to an ever increasing share of the limited resources available to international breeding programmes? In Part 1, we will examine these issues in detail, beginning in this chapter with a brief overview of the evolution of the agbiotech concept and development of the industry until the present day.

Agbiotech, or agricultural biotechnology, can be defined as the use of DNA-based technologies for crop improvement. Agbiotech is normally regarded as the development and use of transgenic crops.