An Economic Assessment of Banana Genetic Improvement and ...

6 CHAPTER 1
periment station. Not all new seed cultivars
are widely grown, or “popular”—especially
in semicommercial, smallholder production
in Africa, where farmers have multiple objectives
and face combinations of biophysical
and economic constraints. Farmers may
not discern the benefits from inserting the
trait, or may view these as less important
than some other disadvantageous traits of
the new cultivar relative to currently grown
cultivars. Even if planting material is available,
and they can afford to purchase it,
farmers will not adopt a cultivar unless the
benefits are perceptible. For example, resistance
to diseases and pests are some of the
traits targeted with gene-based technologies.
Evidence suggests that although farmers
are knowledgeable about pests that they
can see and touch (weeds, insect, vertebrate
pests), they know much less about plant
diseases and insect reproduction (Bentley
1994; Orr 2003), which scientists observe
with the assistance of laboratories and controlled
experiments. Incidence varies over
years and within crop stands, following a
statistical distribution that farmers observe
incompletely.
As with any introduced technology,
knowing the social determinants and social
consequences of adoption is important for
designing policy interventions to support it.
Though planting material may be neutral to
the scale of the farm operation (meaning
that there is nothing inherent in the technology
that implies large-scale farmers will
have greater ability to use it than will smallholder
farmers), there is typically an aspect
of the technology that favors its adoption by
certain social groups. Reviews of related
literature for other periods and regions confirm
that whether a technology benefits
poor people depends more on underlying
social and economic conditions than on the
intrinsic attributes of the technology (Feder,
Just, and Zilberman 1985; Feder and Umali
1993; Hazell and Haddad 2001; Meinzen-
Dick et al. 2007).
Compared with conventional technologies,
some challenges are unique to genetically
transformed seed, such as the need to
develop appropriate biosafety regulatory
frameworks (Cohen and Paarlberg 2004).
Governments have a public responsibility to
invest in assisting farmers to make informed
choices and to take full advantage of the
technology if they choose to use it (Tripp
2001; Smale and de Groote 2003). Citizens
of African nations will want to make their
own informed decisions.
Crop Biotechnology for
African Smallholders
Technological innovations are undoubtedly
necessary for economic change and growth,
and there is no question that feasible technology
options can be found on the research
shelves of African nations. A recent expert
survey revealed 40 biotechnology products
in the public research pipeline for Kenya,
South Africa, and Zimbabwe alone (Atanassov
et al. 2004; Cohen 2005). Only in
South Africa, however, have transgenic crop
cultivars been released to farmers.
Given this situation, assessment of the
technologies is by definition ex ante, or
based on prediction. The case study summarized
in this report was selected from
among products now in research pipelines
according to several criteria. It can be argued
that the biotechnology innovations
with greatest promise for smallholder farmers
in Africa today are those that (1) tackle
economically important biotic or abiotic
constraints that are not easily addressed
through conventional plant breeding or
methods of control (de Vries and Toenniessen
2001); (2) pose little risk of endangering
trade through exports to countries that do
not accept transgenic products (Nielsen,
Thierfelder, and Robinson 2001); and (3)
can make a difference in the welfare of
smallholder farmers by serving as either
sources of food or cash.
First, to be cost effective, biotechnology
tools should demonstrate a comparative advantage
relative to other tools or tool combinations.
To target traits effectively and result