The International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications (ISAAA) is a not-for-profit organisation. The mission of ISAAA is to help alleviate poverty and hunger in the Third World by increasing crop productivity and income generation, particularly for resource-poor farmers, and to create a safer environment and promote more sustainable agricultural development. ISAAA's activities as an 'honest broker' involve the transfer of appropriate crop biotechnology applications and products, particularly proprietary technology, from the North for the benefit of developing countries in the South, by building partnerships between national programmes in the South and institutions in the North. In the past, developing countries and the institutes assisting them with agricultural research accessed non-proprietary traditional technology from the public sector in industrial countries. With the advent of biotechnology this situation is changing, because biotechnology applications are increasingly proprietary and are owned primarily by private sector corporations in industrial countries. The activities of ISAAA in brokering biotechnology applications are described as well as the support services it provides for national programmes in Africa, Asia and Latin America. (C) 2001 Society of Chemical Industry.
