Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda are conducting field trials of biotech crops, the final step before full approval of commercialisation.
In 2012, biotech crops represented 35% of the global commercial seed market.
Still, businesses led by the city's biotech industry demanded change.
He was influential – a co-founder of the magazine Corporate Watch who'd written the first article about the evils of Genetically Modified Organisms [GMOs] and Monsanto, the multinational biotech company whose work with GMOs was to become notorious.
Over in the US, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen repeated rates would rise when the economic data improved, but comments from the central bank that some social media and biotech stocks were substantially overvalued hit shares in those sectors.
The third, in September, was Sir Christopher Evans, a biotech businessman who had lent Labour £1m.
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Having decided it has little edge in basic research, it now makes alliances with biotech firms that have promising products, but limited resources, and helps them through the later stages of research and marketing.
(Irritatingly for Merck the licenser was Vertex, a biotech firm set up by Joshua Boger, a former senior director of basic chemistry at Merck and the firm's most sorely missed defector).
Such jokes have yet to catch on, but southern high-tech industries are growing briskly.North Carolina is home to 88 biotech and 100 biotech-related firms, mostly in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill "research triangle".
The government has started with hotels and the sugar and biotech industries.
