Nutrition and Technology Transfer Policies
by John H. Barton
Issue Paper 6
The most important policy issues in the context of nutrition and technology transfer are related to intellectual property rights; competition issues in the seed, food processing and marketing sectors; biosafety questions; and trade and macroeconomic considerations. Humans obtain food through two fundamentally different ways. One is relatively selfsufficient subsistence farming in which a small economic unit, typically a family, produces its own food. The other is production of food for a market and the consumption of purchased goods.
The task for technology transfer in a smallholder economy is to improve the subsistence farmer’s standard of nutrition. In a market economy, technology transfer has a double objective: first, to enable the production of larger quantities of marketable products; and second, to improve the movement of food from the farm to the consumer. Reflecting the increasing degree of urbanisation worldwide, subsistence farming is steadily losing ground to the market economy. This trend poses serious challenges for nutrition and technology transfer policies. Recent World Bank figures show that current food production levels are clearly too low to satisfy the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015.