**Acknowledgements**

*Elements of Bioeconomy*

gies, and upscale best practices and technologies.

output with just slight increases in targeted funding to them.

Application of biotechnology in agriculture has increased in recent years due to unrelenting effect of climate change exacerbated by a rapidly growing population. Countries that have adopted biotechnology in their agricultural systems, for example, have significantly improved yields and other farm-level benefits. Safety of biotechnology and particularly products of genetic engineering is assured through rigorous safety assessments conducted within national and international biosafety

**4.5 Financial resources for R&D**

facilities is, in the short- to medium term, seen as a means of gradually supporting the strengthening of capacities in the biotechnology fields in SSA. In SSA, the four agricultural sectors—crops, forestry, livestock, and fisheries/aquaculture—are not necessarily under the same ministry. Indeed, in some countries all of these sectors are in different government ministries—although finding livestock and crops under the same ministry is increasingly more common. The administrative separation of these sectors, combined with poor cross-sectoral coordination is inimical to efficiency in the development of technologies. It limits consolidation and exploitation of synergies across sectors owing to bureaucratic procedure required to share physical and human resources—such as labs and personnel. For most countries, sharing of these resources across ministries is just not practiced at all. Even mobilization of resources is done separately by sector, and the amounts allocated to the "hosting ministry" do not always reflect the needs. The countries also need to establish and/ or strengthen biotechnology R&D multisectoral networks at national levels and explore mechanisms for linking these to subregional and continental initiatives in order to leverage resources, create synergies, and avoid duplication (hence, enhance efficiency), facilitate learning, horizontal and transboundary transfer of technolo-

The main challenge for public agricultural biotechnology R&D in SSA remains how to mobilize investment capital (beyond what is needed for personnel and infrastructure) to initiate or sustain research (and facilitate the process of taking findings to commercial use). Although there has been some growth in the level of funding to ARD in some countries, the level of financing is still extremely low, especially for biotechnology, and not allowing countries to engage effectively in cutting-edge biotech research. Most of the current biotechnology R&D programs are donor funded—with very limited domestic investments; in most countries the allocation is only for salaries (for the limited number of biotech personnel). Although precise value of agricultural biotechnology spending is difficult to obtain, estimates made on the basis of 2014 sector figures (focusing only on crops and livestock) obtained from ASTI database show that most countries invest very limited amounts on agricultural biotechnology. Mobilization of resources (from domestic and other sources) for agricultural biotech is clearly a major area that governments need to look at. In the meantime, given the high cost of biotech R&D, available investments need to be used in a much more coordinated manner to achieve efficiencies from scale and complementarity—and hence the need for cross-sector coordination in biotech R&D. Despite the clear dominance of the public sector both in the financing and implementation of agricultural research, the unstable funding of ARD to date suggests that other avenues should be explored. Universities in SSA, for example, are an underutilized resource that could greatly increase research

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**5. Conclusions**

Values of agricultural biotechnology spending in SSA countries were obtained from IFPRI's Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) database (www.asti.cgiar.org) and were analyzed with the assistance of staff at PICO Eastern Africa.
