Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
corn, however, has increased rapidly in recent years (James, 2007), and so the
percentage of corn seed value obtained from technology fees and royalties is
still rising.
Public-sector wheat seed breeding has remained relatively more important
worldwide than public-sector breeding in some other major crops because
successful wheat hybrids have not been widely deployed and because other
technical factors have not allowed private breeders to capture a greater share
of the returns from wheat breeding. Nonetheless, royalties have made up about
an eighth of total wheat seed values in recent years. Particularly in Europe, and
more recently in other high-income countries, institutional arrangements have
evolved in which seed distributors pay royalties from the sale of wheat seed to
the breeders, private or public, of the varieties involved. Because GM wheat
has not yet been planted commercially, royalties from the sale of wheat seed
do not reflect the value of GM traits for this crop.
For the largest national seed market, the United States, it is possible to
estimate the value of GM traits in corn, soybeans, and cotton using price data
on “biotech” and “nonbiotech” seed from the USDA's National Agricultural
Statistics Service (USDA/NASS),
5
USDA/NASS data on total crop area
planted
6
and the share of total area planted to crops with GM traits,
7
and
seeding rates from USDA's Agricultural Resource Management Survey
(ARMS).
8
Using these data, we first calculated the value of germplasm for all
seed used in a given crop, biotech and nonbiotech, by using the nonbiotech
seed price. We then estimated the value of GM traits by applying the
difference between the biotech and the nonbiotech price to the area planted to
GM crops.
9
The estimates followed the same pattern as the global estimates,
with trait value accounting for the greatest percentage of total seed value for
cotton and the lowest percentage for corn. These differences among crops may
reflect the degree of adoption of GM traits, the market value of GM traits in
comparison to the market value of the underlying germplasm, or other market
or technical factors that are less well understood. Biotech traits accounted for
about half the total value of cotton seed in the United States in 2001. After
continuing to rise for several more years, the share has remained at about 80
percent since 2007. Biotech traits represented only 7 percent of the U.S. corn
seed market value in 2001 but rose to 28 percent in 2007 and to 37 percent in
2009. Biotech traits have fluctuated between 30 and 40 percent of the U.S.
soybean seed market for much of the past decade, reaching a high of 42
percent in 2007 but falling to 30 percent in 2009. Based on these data, the
value of biotech traits for corn, soybeans, and cotton taken together have
