Key Messages

1. By building five scenarios—Global Orchestration (GO), Order from Strength (OS), Life as it is, Adapting Mosaic (AM), and TechnoGarden (TG)—future alternatives are provided to answer the question: “How can we reduce hunger and poverty, improve rural livelihoods, and facilitate equitable, environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable development through the generation, access to, and use of agricultural knowledge, science, and technology?”

2. These scenarios present different challenges that require complex adjustments in order to ensure the successful performance of AKST systems and productive systems. The scenarios show us that in the real world of Latin America and the Caribbean, it is not feasible to think in terms of simple technological solutions or global solutions to respond to the growing complexity and vulnerability of these systems.

3. In most of the scenarios, the AKST systems have favorable social and environmental repercussions for society as a whole. Science generates innovation and helps improve competitiveness and production efficiency, and the quality of the products in terms of safety, diversity, bromatological quality, and nutritional value for all social groups (including the most vulnerable ones, depending on the scenario), and reduces the impact of agricultural activities on the environment.

4. The existence of trade barriers of different types would increase the cost of agricultural activity and threaten the sustainability of small farms, and it would create specific demand for AKST systems. The scenarios assume different types of barriers, which would expand over time, as a result of difficulties stemming from various factors—environmental, economic, and biological—even in the scenarios depicting a highly integrated and economically open world (GO and TG). These barriers, which could lead to the loss of important markets and a reduced capacity for economic insertion on markets suitable for small-scale agricultural producers, would be eliminated with good policies and management capacity. The barriers would in turn generate demand for AKST systems to create mechanisms and protocols that would allow for adequate compliance with international laws and rules pertaining primarily to the most vulnerable productive systems.

5. The scenarios assume institutional changes of varying intensity in the region. In some scenarios, the changes would accompany the current development model, which shows trends towards greater stability and consistency among social development, environmental, food, innovation, and biosafety policies, and greater capacity to manage these policies (except for Order from Strength). But deepseated institutional changes—such as changes in the paradigms of agriculture itself, and consequently in the AKST system and in the expansion of power of various interest groups—would be required to introduce and implement successfully the Adapting Mosaic.

6. Losses in productivity of productive systems in response to variations n the contextual factors vary in the different scenarios. Rising peratures, the manifestation of extreme weather events, and an increase in diseases, ests, and contamination of foods are contextual factors that have a fferential mpact on production systems in the different scenarios. More specifically,the eatest losses would occur in scenarios that emphasize trade or the ones that redict a limited capacity to prevent and eliminate or reduce epidemics (the case of Order from Strength).

7. Agribusiness in LAC would diversify and expand differentially, and mall-cale producers would face challenges. In some scenarios, new uses ould be added for existing or new commodities. In various scenarios, earticipation of a limited group of countries in markets of differentiated products ldevelop. These markets would require substantial inputs of knowledge and echnology (in the case of differentiated products) or production on a large-scale (in the case of commodities). Small-scale producers in Latin America and the Caribbean would be challenged to meet these requirements.

8. In some scenarios, there would be important interdisciplinary advances in formal knowledge, especially in relation to facilitating technologies—such as biotechnology and nanotechnology—and ecology. In others, there would be a high degree of integration between these technologies and other knowledge, such as agroecology and traditional knowledge. In GO and TG, there would be integration between materials engineering, food technology and biology, for instance, either to expand basic knowledge, or to generate new technologies capable of increasing quality and efficiency or reducing production costs. International progress in scientific and technological knowledge, which would demand large amounts
of resources, should be followed by AKST systems in LAC, to prevent their knowledge from becoming obsolete and the consequent loss of relevance for the region. In view of the current situation of AKST investment in LAC, which is not only limited but is also extremely heterogeneous, these technological and scientific changes would pose important threats to the region’s systems.

9. Traditional knowledge would be increasingly valued and incorporated into certain scenarios (AM, TG). Barriers, pests, diseases, and climate change would create needs for solutions using local knowledge, and its integration would be facilitated by institutional changes in these scenarios. In the other scenarios (GO, OS, and Life as it is), the integration of traditional knowledge would occur only occasionally, due to commercial interests and defective institutional structural arrangements.

10. In some of the scenarios (GO, OS, Life as it is) advances in formal knowledge and technological development linked to productive chains would remain in the hands of large transnational corporations. In other words, many countries in the region could lose the capacity to independently generate knowledge, which is the most important factor of development in the contemporary world.