Science policy and agricultural biotechnology in Canada

This paper examines Canadian science and technology (S&T) policies in the 1990s and the growth of the agriculture biotechnology sector. Drawing from several different data sources, we show that advances in biotechnology have made a substantive contribution to the agri-food landscape as evident by the growth in biotechnology companies, as well as the number of approved genetically modified field trials and canola biotechnology patents issued to inventors. We also show that Canadian inventors do not appear to have harvested a substantive number of enabling canola biotechnology patents as compared to U.S. and European inventors.