The private sector is playing an increasingly important role in livestock genetic improvement. Specialized breeding firms now supply virtually all commercial poultry breeding stock and growing market shares of improved genetic material for swine, beef, and dairy cattle. This article examines how incentives for private investment in livestock breeding are affected by consumer demand, market stru...

The U.S. Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) of 1970 was meant to strengthen intellectual property protection for plant breeders. A model of investment under partial excludability is developed, leading to the hypotheses that any increase in excludability or appropriability of the returns to invention, attributable to the PVPA, would lead to increases in investment or efficiency gains in varieta...

A genetic improvement program on the Creole goat of Guadeloupe is presently underway. It is a medium-sized meat breed with a traditional slaughter weight of 18 kg which can be reached at 6 to 18 months of age, depending on the system. Experiments are on-going at INRA upon the effects of diet, management conditions, helminth infestation on Creole kids with the aim of improving the goat meat prod...

Genetic improvement of planting material (in a broad sense) is an important component of agricultural growth for nations and regions in the process of economic development. Asia’s Green Revolutions in rice and wheat are perhaps the best-known examples of dramatic agricultural growth associated with crop genetic improvement. Most experts agree that no such seed-based revolution has occurred in S...

Studies on the priorities for agricultural research in Eastern and Central Africa concluded that milk is the most important commodity for research and development in the region, based on its potential contribution to the agricultural GDP. It has been presumed that, the right policies, marketing systems and technical support must be sought for dairy development in Africa. In order to determine t...

Substantial advances have been made in the genetic improvement of agriculturally important animal and plant populations through artificial selection on quantitative traits. Most of this selection has been on observable phenotype, without knowledge of the genetic architecture of the selected characteristics, which is treated as a black box, with no knowledge of the number of genes that affect th...

The sucrose storage process of sugarcane has attracted the interest of plant physiologists for 100 years whereby, depending on the availability of techniques and concepts, the biochemical part of enzymology preceded the aspect of compartmentation and transport. With the new techniques of molecular biology and genetic engineering, the manipulation of enzymatic processes has started again, puttin...

An antagonistic genetic relationship between direct and maternal effects for birth weight (and weaning weight) makes the concurrent genetic improvement of the two traits more challenging than if the correlation was zero or favourable. The direction and magnitude of the genetic correlation between maternal and direct effects for lamb birth weight are equivocal with several moderate negative and ...

Profit from cattle enterprises is influenced by the value of sale animals, less the costs of their production. Ever-changing production and economic circumstances provide both threats and opportunities to cow-calf producers, bull breeders and feedlotters. Feeding strategies and other aspects of management typically require continuous betweenand within-year modification in order to optimize marg...