One of the great pending accounts of our country is have companies capable of entering and competing internationally. One explanation for this deficiency lies, among other things, in the low level of innovation. According to the 2022 global innovation index, prepared by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Argentina ranks 69 out of 132 countries, while if we only take into consideration the Latin American and Caribbean region , things do not improve too much, occupying position 8.
In this sense, it is no coincidence that the latest waves of innovation that shaped the international economy have not been well surfed by Argentina. As a reflection, it is enough to look at the evolution of the composition of our Merval index, which has not had significant changes in the last decades in terms of the weight of the main sectors that make it up, evidencing a clear technological decoupling.
In order to export more and internationalize, it is necessary to be in tune with the technological revolutions that are taking place in the world and with the global challenges that they intend to address and solve. This is where biotechnology appears as an opportunity for internationalization, for various reasons:
1) Today, the world is rightly immersed in a new technological revolution -probably the most disruptive that humanity has witnessed to date-, marked by the intersection and significant advances in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology, configuring a true “biorevolution”.
2) At present, the main global problems are solved with biotechnology. Pandemics, ecological disasters associated with climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the challenges posed by food security, among others, require biotechnology-based solutions that, in addition to being sustainable, are efficient and profitable. In 2020, the international consultancy Mc Kinsey published a report titled The Bio Revolution in which it stands out that 60% of the physical inputs of the world economy could be produced biologically, while 30% of the global burden of diseases could be addressed from biotechnological developments.
3) Naturally, everything expressed in point 2 has an impact on the reconfiguration of global value chains and trade flows. In this sense, countries capable of leading biotechnological developments and promoting a functional agenda for the emergence of biotechnology-based companies will have greater diplomatic weight -the geopolitics of vaccines is just one example of this- and greater participation in international trade. , with the consequent positive externalities in terms of job creation and foreign currency income.
4) Argentina, to the surprise of many, has some interesting advantages to build a development model supported by biotechnology, which allows it to position itself as a supplier in different links of the new global value chains. Diverse and abundant natural resources, a vast biodiversity, ample capacity for biomass production, highly qualified human resources and well-developed lines of research in different verticals of the so-called “life sciences” account for this. The country has the conditions to establish itself as a hub for biomanufacturing and the development of bioplatforms that enable the emergence of biotechnological startups.
5) In the context of growing international tensions and the aforementioned reconfiguration of global value chains, the concept of “friend-shoring”, this is the relocation of investments in safe and friendly places from a geopolitical perspective (mitigating risks is today as important or more important than reducing costs). Argentina -away from the global geopolitical noise- may well make this an advantage and present itself as a safe link in the new global supply chains.
6) Non-tariff barriers promise to be increasingly associated with the need to have developments based on biotechnology, sustainable and friendly to the environment. In this sense, biotechnology could be the key to market access for many products in the immediate future.
The reasons given show the importance of biotechnology as a key to international insertion while urgently demanding the development of a true “agenda biotech”. Those countries that do not do so will again be left behind and will have to wait for a new wave of innovation to catch up. Better not miss this opportunity.
For this, in addition to sectoral work, a condition sine qua non is to order the macroeconomic imbalances. It is well worth remembering: a bad macro can mortally wound even the best micro.
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