Developing appropriate technology: Africa and China

During 2006 and 2007, a raft of new initiatives and programmes sprang into being around the goal of promoting agricultural technology, including biotechnology, in the African continent. These initiatives have been led by African governments themselves, as well as by international aid donors, agricultural research centres and philanthropic organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Africa remains the part of the world which faces the most intractable problems of entrenched poverty and poor productivity in agriculture. The new initiatives mentioned above are intended to stimulate new innovation and growth in African farming, a new ‘Green Revolution’ to match the transformations which took place in other parts of the world during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. While most people agree that agriculture urgently needs a boost in Africa, some critics worry that the new programmes and frameworks represent a large-scale, top-down approach that will fail to meet the needs of small farmers. Some of the documents listed below explore the scope and potential for a specifically African way of harnessing the potential of modern agricultural biotechnologies.

China is another part of the globe where government, scientists and policy-makers are working towards a uniquely tailored approach to biotechnology development. For many years now, China has taken a circumspect approach to GM crops, having allowed the commercial release of some GM cotton varieties but held back from approving the commercialisation of GM rice. China has been identified by some researchers as behaving like a developmental state in relation to biotechnology, as it has sought to foster an indigenous biotech industry while keeping foreign multinationals at arms’ length. Some of the materials listed below look specifically at the case of China.