Ecology and biotechnology

Nowadays, the boom of biotechnologies is observed in the developed world countries. The boom of biotechnologies has influenced not only over food production, agriculture, pharmaceutical industry, but also has changed the approaches to wastes utilization and other aspects of economic activity.  The world leading countries facilitate the development of biotechnology, because they have already estimated its ecological safety and relative low price.

Biotechnology is one of the most rapidly developing industries in all civilized countries, aimed at progress. Biotechnology helps to increase the agricultural productivity; it leads the pharmaceutical industry to the new level, playing the important role in environmental protection. Step-by-step, biotechnologies are encroaching on all industries: mining and metallurgical industry, oil extracting industry. The new industry – biogeotechnology has started active development. 

Lately, the development of biotechnologies in Ukraine has slowed down greatly, because this research area is rather expensive and requires long-term and complicated exploratory procedures and clinical trials. Besides, the licensing and obtaining permits for the EU and USA markets entering are also rather expensive. The barrier for development of this industry is weak protection of intellectual property in Ukraine. The main problems for this industry development in Ukraine are as follows: absence of financial backing, absence of new developments, obsolete production technology, taxation, shortage of current assets, complexity of outer markets entering.
It is difficult to appraise the annual volume of the Ukrainian biotechnology market, as it is ill-structured and the statistics of biotechnological products is almost absent. However, Ukrainian biotechnologies have all chances of making up for the lost time.
Ukraine has all necessary conditions for growth of own biotechnological production: industrial potential, available prospective projects and developments, constantly increasing demand on the domestic market, rather cheap energy sources (in comparison with the People’s Republic of China and India), cheap and generally available raw materials for fermenting. One should also take into account that about 35-40% of production cost is represented by energy consumption and about 25-30% - by raw materials. Therefore, Ukraine has advantage over the Western countries according to these indices. In order to continue the development of biotechnology in Ukraine, it is necessary to implement new economic and managerial approaches to manufacture and promotion of biotechnological production to sales markets. 
The most prospective biotechnology areas in Ukraine are the following: biotechnology for medicine and biotechnology for agribusiness. The prospects of the first area are connected with the fact that many developments have recently found practical application in medicine and health care; this tendency is expected to preserve in future, because of high level of pharmaceutical industry allocations for R&D (Research and Development) and large market potential as a result of growing consumption of this group of commodities. It should also be mentioned that the Ukrainian market possesses some developments, which are highly competitive with the foreign ones, having low cost. Taking into account the fact that foreign pluripotential medicine is very expensive and is not affordable for all consumers, investment into this direction will be very attractive. 

Besides, the development of biotechnology in the environmental protection should be noted as well as increase of the ecology role in Ukraine. Nowadays, it is almost impossible to operate without application of the newest ecobiotechnology. First of all, this technology is used for sewage water treatment, diagnostics of environment pollution, wastes utilization, decontamination of dangerous gas emissions, substitution of some agricultural chemicals for biotechnology products, etc. Many Ukrainian enterprises started to consider the development of this direction, which is especially important with the view to the complex ecological situation in the country. Besides, the biotechnology, related to the environmental protection, wastes biodeterioration and utilization, extraction of biological fuel; namely, the ecobiotechnology is the separate and the most prospective direction of the modern hi tech.

One of the upcoming trends of solving the problem of Ukraine’s dependency on import of petrochemicals, which are constantly getting more expensive, is the development of environmentally friendly alternative biological fuel, based on vegetable oils. The development of this direction may also lead to improvement of ecological situation, as emissions of biological fuel are not so harmful for the environment. Moreover, Ukraine has all conditions for rape growing, used for production of this biological fuel. Thus, this direction is rapidly developing in Ukraine. Consequently, huge investments into development of this direction are expected in the nearest future.

Also, recently, Ukraine has begun to think about the prospects of alternative energy sources development. Using energy saving technology and alternative energy sources, Ukraine can considerably decrease the dependence on the Russian gas supplies. The development of “green” energy sector and implementation of energy saving technologies are rather advantageous, besides the European institutions provide rather competitive credits for development of this sphere.