marker-assisted selection in wheat

Chapter 22 – Marker-assisted selection: policy considerations and options for developing countries 449agricultural policy focuses on alleviationof rural poverty. By shifting futureinvestments in research towards anemerging paradigm of “research fordevelopment”, the research agenda isbroadened to ensure functional linkagesto national development policies and toinclude the wider dimensions of livelihoodstrategies in both planning and assessingthe impact of projects and programmes.It also shifts past emphasis on inputbasedtechnology supply by scientiststo demand and need-driven innovationsystems involving many other actors.Political commitment is also crucial toensure sustainability of funding;• advances in science, and most notablyin the computing and biological sciences,as these have provided new techniquesand tools for researchers to locate betterand therefore target production systemsand communities most associated withpoverty and food insecurity, and newtechnologies in the form of seeds, breedingstock, vaccines, etc. with the potentialto increase productivity within agriculturalsystems and wider food chains andimprove economic and social well-being.They are also helping to overcome barriersto wider social engagement in decision-making;• growing acceptance of the importance ofoptimizing system productivity by bettermanagingthe interactions among diversifiedfarm enterprises and sustainableresource management and ensuring accessto markets, rather than maximizing individualcrop or animal performance;• expanded intellectual property rights(IPRs) for biological innovations (seeChapter 20) and changed norms foraccessing and sharing the benefits ofgenetic resources in general and plantgenetic resources in particular, supportedby international agreements, conventionsand treaties (see later);• increased private investment in S&T ingeneral, and within agriculture, throughboth R&D directed primarily towardscrop, livestock and fish genetic improvement,and the delivery of productsthrough multinational and national seedand breeding companies and their franchises;• expanded public–private sector collaborationin research, development and extension,in some countries supported bylegislation;• increased public awareness of the relevanceof the uptake of new technologiesand their significance for improving thelivelihoods of rural people.These changes have already been feltmost forcefully in industrialized and largedeveloping countries such as Brazil, China,India and South Africa, where the demandpullcreated for products of R&D isgreatest. However, their impact is increasinglyspilling over into others, includingthe low-income food-deficit countrieswith much less capacity to benefit fromor otherwise adjust to the new realities ofconducting S&T in a globalized world. Animportant issue for all countries is thereforehow to adapt their NARES to respondbetter to both the current and likely futureneeds of their agricultural sectors, and in sodoing to consider their S&T “futures”, oneof which is clearly modern biotechnology.Nonetheless, judging by the content of bothPRSPs and national agricultural developmentpolicies and strategies, few developingcountries appear to have started along thisroad by producing an integrated agriculturalresearch and extension policy. Thissituation is hardly conducive to obtainingpolitical and financial support for R&Don approaches such as MAS, which, as