Economic implications of Agro-Food biotechnology

Biotechnology has emerged as one of the key technologies of the 20th century but it has not had strong economic impacts in the Agro-Food sector so far. Based on a Delphi survey in Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain the implications of modem biotechnology on the food and non-food markets as well as its employment effects are analysed in this paper. Using factor analysis the habituation of consumers to gene food, the emergence of specific biotechnology related market niches in the food and non-food area, the regulation procedures and the price strategy could be empirically filtered out as main influential factors for future markets impacts of modern biotechnology. Only limited job growth is to be expected in the coming years in specialised biotech and food supplying companies, while traditional jobs in agriculture and the food industry will probably decrease in future partly due to the use of modern biotechnology. (C) 2000 Society of Chemical Industry.