Clive James
International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA)

Genetically modified (GM) crops, often referred to as biotech crops, have made phenomenal progress in both industrial and developing countries during the last 18 years (1996 to 2013). The first biotech crops with two commercial traits—insect resistance (IR) and herbicide tolerance (HT)—were commercially planted by six founding countries in 1996, and this led to a new era of crop production. The United States, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, China, and Australia were the first to approve the commercial planting of Bt cotton and HT soybean. In 1996, a few thousand pioneer farmers planted Bt cotton and HT soybean on 1.7 million hectares, followed later by biotech maize and canola. The policy and regulatory framework, nascent at that time, evolved rapidly around the concept of ‘substantial equivalence’ in the United States and Canada and a few developing countries, which included Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines, and India. The adoption of biotech crops soared from 1.7 million hectares in 1996 to 175 million hectares in 2013, more than a hundred-fold increase, which makes biotech crops the fastest-adopted crop technology in the recent history of agriculture, reflecting the trust and confidence of millions of farmers world-wide in the technology. Read more…