As mudanças no setor de Biotecnologia e seus impactos sobre a economia brasileira: as relações das corporações ciências da vida e a Embrapa

Abstract

The last three decades have been a period of great progress in the biological sciences, especially since 1973 when the techniques of recombinant DNA (possibility of removing a gene from one organism and later inserting it into the DNA of another, starting to work as if it were in the original organism), has allowed the emergence of new products with the desired characteristics, for example, agricultural varieties resistant to insects and diseases. This period marks the emergence of what has been called “modern biotechnology” and establishes the beginning of private participation in Research and Development (R&D) of biotechnological products, hitherto carried out, mostly by the public sector. With the entry of large companies such as Monsanto, Novartis and Aventis, and the subsequent strategies adopted to increase their participation (mergers, acquisitions and partnerships), the sector became extremely concentrated, around seven companies, which constituted a new industry, called “life sciences”. This global restructuring process, carried out by the multinationals, has generated impacts in several economies that have great potential for their products, such as Brazil. This paper proposes to observe the impacts of changes in the biotechnology sector on the Brazilian economy and the main existing relationships between “life sciences” companies and the public sector, with EMBRAPA as the focus of analysis. The results were achieved based on in studies of reports published annually by companies and EMBRAPA. There was an increase in the participation of multinationals, mainly in the agricultural sector, due to the recent acquisitions of these companies, in the national scenario. For EMBRAPA, especially CENARGEN, there was an increase in the number of partnerships with companies in the private sector, mainly due to the difficulty of financing the public sector, signaling a possible privatization of public research, where these companies start to share knowledge and the genetic resources developed over the years. Thus, the use of techniques that enable greater financial returns, such as the development of transgenic plants and other modern biotechnology techniques, are prioritized at the expense of others of the same importance for the Brazilian market, such as, for example, tissue culture and fixation biological nitrogen. In this way, the process of global restructuring of the agrifood system, carried out by the predominance of liberalizing policies and by large “life sciences” corporations, has directly impacted the Brazilian market, either through the concentration of the agricultural market controlled by multinationals or, simply , by weakening the participation of the public sector in the economy, becoming only responsible for the implementation of policies that greatly benefit the private sector.