A No Man's Land Called Agri-Biotech

There are many reasons why agri-food life sciences aren't warming up many investors in India. Agri-Biotech is currently the no man's land for those stranded between plant sciences and life sciences.

In a gripping episode of?X-Files, federal agents Mulder and Scully investigate gruesome murders of psychics -palm readers, astrologers et al- who ironically couldn’t escape the vicissitudes of fate. As the agents unearth the crime procedural throughout the episode, we discover that the crimes had…yes you guessed it right…the?same?pattern.

The murderer proceeds to get his fortune read before brutally slaying them. It emerges that the murderer was on a bloody quest for meaning.

Only one psychic manages to escape his vicious fate. He was an insurance salesman and was able to recognize the criminal.

“Why am I compelled to kill all these people”?

The salesman responds with a hard-pressed tone that desperately masks his nervousness while standing on the ledge of life and death.

"Don't you get it, son? You're a homicidal maniac."

Thrilled by the newfound insight, the maniac proceeds to kill the salesman.

The salesman’s reply is both banal and ironic?- what it says about how we classify people and startups is the topic of today’s newsletter.

(***This anecdote is a retelling from the introduction of a fascinating book:?Sorting Things Out. Classification and its Consequences)

Why is it so funny? Some time back, an entrepreneur friend was fuming over this classification put together by ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) for agritech startups.

What about agri-food life sciences? How could an organization of such stature completely remain oblivious to this category? The reasons aren’t hard to fathom for those in Indian academia who don’t?get?Yogi Berra’s wisdom

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is”

Those who study agriculture do not study the core of life sciences. They end up reading applied sciences such as cropping, and agronomy. Who is out there to teach biochemistry, physiology, and chemistry needed to come up with innovations in agrifood life sciences?

And what about those plant biochemists and physiologists who come up with real solutions but don’t know how to take them to market or worse unable to diagnose if their solution is marketable in the first place?

No wonder, investment activity is paltry in India, when compared to its global counterparts.

Illustration done by yours truly based on?AgFunder 2022 Agrifood startup funding report. India numbers are based on 2021 Agfunder report.

In a recent?oped, Mark Kahn spelt out the reasons why agri-food life sciences aren’t attracting world-class talent.

“In the digital startup ecosystem, over the past few decades, entrepreneurs and investors returned to India with global exposure. In contrast, Indian life sciences talent continues to migrate abroad at the earliest possible opportunity and rarely returns home. In India, scientists are not considered wealth creators, and there is very limited spending on R&D domestically.”

Limited spending on R&D domestically is also a function of the opaqueness of the registration process.

“As of 30 June 2020, 273 molecules and 746 formulations are registered in India. Compared to India, as of 31 October 2020, around 473 molecules are registered in the European Union (EU) and 527 molecules are registered in Japan.” -Jitendar Mohan, COO, Willowood India?Agribusiness Global

Few months ago, the National Institute of Plant Health Management issued a circular around the time the Indian government was considering regulating?the biostimulants sector.

Several unregistered biopesticides had chemical pesticides almost equal to technical grade pesticides.

Given all of this, why would companies be willing to invest in bringing together new molecules when they know for sure that it would spawn so many me-too registrations in the market?

“While there is an entrepreneurial effervescence, most startups have stalled at the proof of concept (POC) or at early validation stages- we term this as the 'graveyard of prototypes'?stage of ecosystem evolution. There are multitudes of reasons for this inertia- lack of infrastructure, inappropriate private and public funds, regulatory hesitancy, procurement bureaucracy and tenuous linkages of academia and industry.?“ - Satya Dash and Vijay Chandru,?Bio-spectrum India

As I am writing this, US President Biden has signed an?executive order?aimed at advancing ‘Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American?Bioeconomy’, with a special focus on “cultivating alternative food sources.

In the previous edition of Agrifood Life Sciences for subscribers, I have spoken about the complexity of organizing the protein supply chain. The crucial metric you need to pay attention to is this:

Considering where the US,?China?and the rest of the world are in driving innovations in agrifood life sciences to feed the world on a warming planet, we need to bring in interdisciplinary thinking to incubate startups, provide them with relevant infrastructure and more importantly, address the albatross of “functional fixedness”?that comes with outdated academia mindsets.

Incubators with strong domain and technology backgrounds and strong channel partners are best placed here to help. For they need to help scientists develop new muscles (and go against their scientist predispositions) to place the business and ground conditions first to take their solutions to market.

Getting out of this no man’s land isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

Theoretically, at least.

It fundamentally requires a switch between looking at the world from two different perspectives.

You could call the first perspective a supply point of view. For scientists and entrepreneurs who are attempting to take the arduous journey from lab to market, the supply point of view consists of doing research and discovering solutions.

And the other side is demand. The demand point of view is all those you can’t control and manage.

When you operate from Demand Thinking (DT) Mode, you think deeply about the Context: What goes on in the life of your customers? What is important in their working and personal lives? What do?they?demand?

In reality, many solutions that seem feasible in the lab?aren’t feasible in the market. A lot of the solutions that we think are aligned towards demand thinking, really aren’t.

Let’s be honest. All of this is easier said than done.

At a time, when biotech advancements are proceeding at a faster pace to invert the?taxonomy?from biotech to techbio,?it can be challenging to navigate this no man’s land.

But try we must if we don’t want the fate of the salesman.

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