Nutrition and Technology Transfer Policies

According to the forward, this report reviews the transfer of nutritional technologies to developing nations, seeking to identify the most important contemporary policy issues at both the national and international levels. The paper considers both the traditional public sector programs to transfer agricultural technologies efforts and the more recent private sector efforts. The technology transfer issues are substantially different for farmers in the market sector and for those in the subsistence/small-holder sector, so
the analysis proceeds in a matrix pattern, looking at the policy issues in each of the four quadrants of the matrix (private/market; public/market; private/small-holder; and public/small-holder). The paper recognizes that nutrition is shaped not only by agriculture but also by food distribution systems and technologies and attempts to take into account the rapid changes in the developing world food distribution process. In this respect, the study concentrates on plant agriculture and food-procession; it does not consider fisheries, but does give some coverage to animal agriculture. The paper considers the variety of policies affecting the transfer of technology in the nutritional area, including intellectual property, competition law, biosafety, international trade, and public sector research issues. In some areas, it poses specific policy issues; in others it calls for further policy-focused research.