Priority Setting for Agricultural Biotechnology Research in Thailand

Recognizing unfocused research policy and unclear priorities in agricultural biotechnology research, this study aims to set research priorities for agricultural biotechnology, specifically for public institutions. The scoring method is used by surveying researchers, experts and stakeholders. The initiative of this study is to classify scoring alternatives using technology platforms instead of research projects or commodities as commonly used in agricultural research policy. The agricultural biotechnology platforms are identified into four areas. Based on five criteria used to evaluate the importance of this technology, fifty-five random samples are asked to score all technology platforms according to each criterion. The overall ranking combining with the necessity of the biotechnology platforms towards the goals reveals that detection and diagnostics, molecular breeding, and cell and tissue culture/embryo transfer/and cloning, should be given highest priorities, respectively. Gene transformation, genomic and post-genomic research should be given less priorities while vaccine technology should also not be ignored.