| Property | Value |
| Name | Biotechnology-assisted Participatory Plant Breeding: Complement or Contradiction? |
| Description | Thro A; Spillane C. 2003. Biotechnology-assisted participatory plant breeding: Complement or contradiction?. CGIAR Systemwide Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis (PRGA Program), Cali, Colombia. 153 p. (Working Document No. 4).This working paper looks beyond the current context in which biotechnology is being applied in agriculture—largely private-sector investment responding to opportunities in capitalized agriculture—to examine current thinking on whether biotechnology can benefit small-scale, resource-poor farmers in developing countries. It asks if farmers can more fully participate, as colleagues or leaders, in shaping and creating the benefits. It investigates the potential of biotechnologies to strengthen farmer participatory research, to empower farmers by increasing their control over germplasm and the biological processes at work in their farming systems, and to provide farmers with new plants or new plant traits to meet their needs. And it looks at the factors that might negatively or positively affect the uptake of biotechnology applications in the future. The paper is the result of an extensive series of interviews, discussions, and surveys involving at least 500 experts, including farmers, participatory researchers, plant breeders, and biotechnologists, in developing and developed countries. The authors hope to advance discussion and understanding of the implications of biotechnology for participatory plant breeding. Only a very few priority-setting exercises with resource-poor farmers have so far resulted in the implementation of biotechnology-assisted research projects. In addition, only a handful of projects that might be construed as biotechnology-assisted participatory plant breeding were identified. Most involve micropropagation, a mature but low-cost biotechnology that can produce results rapidly. Some of the biotechnology tools that formal-sector plant breeders are now adopting could theoretically be applied in resource-poor farming systems, either directly by expert farmer breeders or with the support of researchers in participatory plant breeding projects. Among the tools that could be used in this way are marker-assisted selection, inducible promoters, controllable male sterility, inducible apomixis, and visual markers. These tools could provide greater flexibility in local breeding, increasing the range of options or prototypes from which farmers can choose. Biotechnologies could, in theory, also be developed that increase farmers'' control over key biological processes in their cropping systems. Such approaches have been suggested as a potentially ''empowering'' form of biotechnology for resource-poor farmers. Because many of these applications would require the use of genetic transformation for delivery, emerging biosafety and other regulatory considerations will also affect their development and deployment. |
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