SACRAMENTO, California-Scientists at a US-sponsored ministerial conference on agricultural technology urged developing countries to do more to frame the public debate about agricultural biotechnology around science, not false perceptions or biased opinion.

Calestous Juma, director of the science, technology and globalization project at Harvard University, said June 24 at the Sacramento even that "policy vacuums" exist in many developing countries on the question of how to publicly communicate developments in agricultural research. He urged governments to establish offices devoted to providing their leaders with continuous and exclusive non-political advice on science and technology as they affect policy.

Juma said many health and environmental concerns about biotechnology are "excuses" that are interfering with countries' ability to concentrate on doing and adapting more agricultural technology research and gaining access to world markets.

He noted that in the 1500s the world experienced a public debate about the effects of coffee on health- similar to the current debate about biotechnology- that led some countries to temporarily ban its sale. France, he said, tried to dissuade people from drinking coffee, fearing wine sale losses. Germany feared losing sale of beer, he said.

However, Juma noted, the coffee bans did not last because advocates of the beverage could prove it was safe to drink.

Robert Farley, executive vice president of Monsanto, added that the key regulatory issue facing plant breeders is the "unpredictability of products ever reaching the market" because of uncertainties about the regulatory process. He urged conference attendees, many of whom are from developing countries, to retain a focus on science in developing their agricultural regulatory systems.

As countries establish more predictable regulatory systems, product developers will invest more in research of various technologies, he said.

Farley said current developments in biotechnology research allow the latest achievements of gene sequencing to be transferred to small farmers around the world. But, he said, regulations that significantly slow the movement of biotech products to markets can prevent farmers from realizing benefits of the technology.

Biotechnology offers farmers an additional, not a controlling, choice of what seeds to plant, Farley said.

He added that the benefits to small farmers of biotechnology have been "most profound" in such countries as China, India, South Africa and Mexico, where farmers plant pest-resistant crops because they cannot afford costly chemical pest control materials.

Some of the pest-resistant crops derived from biotechnology being planted are doubly valuable to farmers because they are also less prone to diseases, Farley said.

He noted that five million farmers in Asia are already planting biotechnology crops.

Farley said plant breeders using biotechnology are developing drought-resistant crops in response to water scarcity, which he called the "challenge of the 21st century." He said agricultural biotechnology can help solve the problem of the world's rapidly increasing population-and demand for more protein in diets to increase life quality- giving farmers the ability to produce more grains that can be used for livestock feed.