some of the major seed country markets (UNCTAD, 2005). There is a strong potential for demand complementarity be­tween agrochemical and seed businesses.
     Another structural change has been increased coordina­tion with a trend towards heightened strategic cooperation amongst large competitors in the agricultural biotechnol­ogy sector and vertical coordination upward and down­ward along the food chain described in the introduction (UNCTAD, 2005)
     The incentives for extensive mergers "... along with the breadth..." of protection accorded to patent holders (in many cases seed or biotech companies), and the increased market concentration of companies engaged in agricultural biotech­nology is giving large corporations unprecedented power vis-à-vis growers and other stakeholders. In particular, the privatization and patenting of agricultural innovation (gene traits, transformation technologies and seed germplasm) have supplanted the traditional agricultural understandings on seed and farmers' rights, such as the right to save and replant seeds harvested from the former crop (UNCTAD, 2005). In some cases, this has resulted in a drastic erosion of traditional farmers' rights and changed farmers from "seed owners" to mere "licensees" of a patented product (UNCTAD, 2005). The synergy and vertical integration offered by the alliance of traditional seed industry and biotech have facilitated a race to buy seed companies by the biotech and agrochemical giants.
     The combination of biotech and seed companies has been crucial to the market penetration of GM varieties. Some of the largest agricultural biotechnology companies in Europe and the United States have emerged as signifi­cant players in the rapidly growing Brazilian seed market (UNCTAD, 2005). By these acquisitions the largest biotech companies have established global corn and oil-seed busi­ness through which to commercialize crop enhancement products in Brazil, a country that had for long resisted GM crops. ESAP countries are a major market for the global biotech and agrochemical giants, thus it is conceivable they would employ similar strategy in ESAP regions. While the synergy and vertical integration can be good thing for busi­ness, it raises serious concerns for AKST development. The companies' overriding profit-seeking motives may not al­ways be compatible with the goals of poverty/hunger reduc­tion and sustainable development.
     The recent development in IPR regime is also a driv­ing force of market consolidation and concentration in the sector. Led by changes in US patent system, growing proprietary rights have been granted to agricultural inno­vation. This leads to increasing number of patents, patents being  increasingly  issued  on   fundamental  technologies, multiple claims over various aspects of a technology. Due to these reasons, even giant companies often find it diffi­cult to avoid infringing patents when conducting product development research.  "Monsanto and DuPont, DuPont and Syngenta, Monsanto and Syngenta, Syngenta and Dow have all filed suits against one another involving claims of patent infringement . . . Besides litigation, 'defensive pat­enting' (companies tend to patent as much as they can to deter litigation though the threat of reciprocal suits) has become common practice within the industry" (UNCTAD, 2005). This thus creates a need to consolidate patent port-

folios, thus acts as an incentive for the extensive mergers and acquisitions in the agricultural biotechnology and seed businesses.
     The asymmetries between the developed and the devel­oping world in aspects like agricultural systems, market in­stitutions and research and regulatory capacity, which raise transaction costs for the latter, increase doubts whether poor people can benefit from the biotechnology develop­ment in terms of spillover or trickle-down effects. China is the only country to have developed GM technology in the public sector with other developing countries depending on imports or local adaptations of imported varieties. Further, GM crops are not targeted at poor farmers and marginal environments as they are not attractive to the private sec­tor agencies involved in this technology (Pingali, 2005). In India, the policy towards GM crops was more of preventive nature in terms of IPRs and trade, precautionary in terms of biosafety and permissive on food safety and consumer choice while being promotional on public research invest­ment (Paarlberg, 2000).
     The crowding of IPRs and the increasing concentra­tion of them in corporations is also jeopardizing research. According to the UNCTAD  study,  "Academic scientists engaged in agricultural research report problems of access to important technologies due to an overlapping set of in­tellectual property (IP) rights on research tools and genetic contents. The reasons would lie in the increasing number of patents being issued, increasing patent breadth and uncer­tain ownership of rights, all resulting in IP congestion and uncertainty. The accumulated transaction costs involved (tracking down owners, conducting negotiations and mul­tiple royalty payments to administer) have created a major access obstruction that is hampering agricultural research, according to some commentators."
     Gepts (2004) used the case of golden rice to explain the problem, "The development of the pro-vitamin A-rich, "golden" rice (Ye et al., 2000) provides a stark example of how quickly an invention can get lost in a "thicket" of IP rights. Seventy IP or tangible property rights belonging to 32 companies and universities had been used in the devel­opment of this rice line (Kryder et al., 2000). In addition, MTAs (material transfer agreements) further complicated the situation. "Freedom to operate" (FTO) was achieved by providing a license to a large biotechnology company, Zeneca, covering not only the pro-vitamin A pathway in rice but also in any other crops, in exchange for a humani­tarian use (defined as a maximum of U.S. $10,000 revenue from golden rice) in developing countries (Potrykus, 2001). Clearly, such a solution was made possible in part because of public relations concerns on the part of the major holders of IPRs, mainly large, multinational biotechnology compa­nies. However, this "segmentation" of the potential market did not solve fundamentally the issue for researchers, farm­ers and consumers in developed countries."
     Gepts also points out the negative impacts and chal­lenges by the IPRs regime on public research: "Public in­stitutions are faced with similar 'thickets of IPRs,' despite the fact that they have been responsible for much of the basic research leading to the initiation and continued de­velopment of biotechnology in the first place (Atkinson et al., 2003). The fragmentation of IPRs covering technolo-