Nuclear technology has been successfully used in Indonesia to cultivate biofuel plants, such as Jatropha curcas L. for bio-diesel and sweet sorghum for bio-ethanol.

These policies take various forms and it would be irresponsible to condemn them as a whole, by claiming, for instance, that bioenergy production to meet domestic needs and limit dependency on the expensive oil imports is the same as large-scale agrofuel production for export purposes; that bioethanol produced from sugar was comparable to the bioethanol produced from maize, or from other crops such as cassava, wheat, sweet sorghum and sugar beets, or that biodiesel produced from rapeseed oil was the same as the biodiesel from palm l or soybean oil.

For commercial reasons, richer farmers are likely to be the main target market for most privately funded plant biotechnology research, as reflected in the crop focus of current agricultural biotechnology research, which is heavily biased towards major commercial — often export — crops, such as maize, soybean, canola, cotton, tobacco, tomato, potato, squash and papaya, rather than the food staples of poorer populations, such as millet, sorghum, cassava, sweet potato and plantains.