5.2. Transitional Issues

Public private balance. Recent policies have promoted privatization and reduced government involvement in the provision of research and extension. These policies have been promoted because of fiscal austerity under adjustment and the observation that government services tend to be inefficient and bureaucratic, and lacking in innovation. An important current issue is to define the appropriate roles of the public and private sectors in the provision of agricultural research and extension. Emerging questions are: to what extent can public agencies be made more efficient by subcontracting services out to private companies? To what extent are agricultural technology and extension services public or private goods? To what extent can the government use economic signals (taxes and subsidies) rather than ownership to overcome market failures? An important determinant of the role of the private sector in biological research is introduction of new legislation regarding patent rights for biological innovations. Increasingly, under appropriate legal protection, biotechnology research is being done by multinational corporations as opposed to the traditional genetic research that produced the Green Revolution where public research systems had an important role to play.