The competing policy paradigms of agricultural biotechnology : implications and opportunities for emerging and developing economies

Agricultural science and technology policies -- including public funding of crop genetics research, intellectual property protections, and biosafety approvals of regulated crops -- can be understood to work together within a 'policy paradigm' to influence the innovation and adoption of crop varieties involving agricultural biotechnologies. The political-economy or public-choice approach views a given policy paradigm as a behaviorally rational response by policymakers to the range of pressures and inducements -- such as political connections, lobbying, political donations, endorsements, elections, and popular movements -- arising from the various segments of society and their respective interest groups. This article seeks to use the political-economy approach to explain why it is, almost twenty-five years after the disruptive technology of genetic engineering was first commercially deployed in crop agriculture, that most countries have a policy paradigm for transgenic crop varieties that resembles the traditional policy paradigm for the chemical pesticide industry rather than the traditional policy paradigm for the seed industry.