TABLE OF CONTENTS Agbiotech began the 1990s with a great deal of promise plus no small measure of hyperbole. However, the events of the past few years have illustrated a sharp dichotomy between the pace of scientific progress and the commercial uptake and public acceptance of the technology. The impact of commercial, political, scientific and economic factors on the future of agbiotech will be crucial.
GMO-based agricultural biotechnology, or agbiotech, is already a large global business with annual sales estimated at over $3 billion in 2000. These sales are projected to rise to $8 billion in 2005 and to $25 billion by 2010 (Anonymous, 2000a). However, agbiotech is not yet a very profitable business: in the first ten months of 2000, an index of medical biotech firms showed a 58% rise in value while those involved in agbiotech showed a decline of 15% (Anonymous, 2000b).
During the mid-1990s several large pharmaceutical and chemical companies bought up or merged with agbiotech companies to create life sciences companies that were assumed to have synergies based on common biotechnologically based research strategies aimed at the development of drug, nutritional, chemical and agricultural products. These consolidations created some large multinational conglomerates such as Agrevo, Aventis, Novartis, Monsanto, Zeneca and Dupont. This strategy has largely unravelled in recent years, for several reasons. First, the economics and scales of production of the agriculture and pharmaceutical sectors are totally different, with the former remaining largely a low-margin, high-volume, commodity-based venture while...
