P. Parameswaran Yahoo News 11 Feb 09;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Genetically modified crops enjoyed a bumper year in 2008, with an additional 10.7 million hectares (26.4 million acres) planted globally and growth prospects set to expand rapidly, a biotech group said Wednesday.
Some 13.3 million farmers in a record 25 countries planted 125 million hectares (309 million acres) of biotech crops last year, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA) said in its annual report.
It reflected a 9.4 percent increase in area covered from 114.3 million hectares (282 million acres) in 2007, the group said. An additional 1.3 million farmers adopted the genetically modified technology last year.
"Future growth prospects are encouraging," ISAAA chairman Clive James and author of the study told reporters.
Citing both rich and emerging nations, he said political leaders were increasingly viewing biotech enhanced crops as "a key part of the solution to critical social issues of food security and sustainability."
By the end of the second decade of commercialization of biotech crops in 2015, ISAAA predicted that a total of 1.61 billion hectares (four billion acres) will have been planted.
With food security a key concern, biotech crops were increasing yields, which increase food availability and supply, and reducing production costs, which would also ultimately help reduce food, James said.
But biotech opponents claim these crops benefited biotech food giants instead of small farmers and the world's hungry population.
They also say that such crops have led to a jump in chemical use and failed to increase yields.
"GM crops are all about feeding biotech giants, not the world's poor," said Nnimmo Bassey, head of Friends of the Earth International, a global environment watchdog, said in a report this week that traditionally precedes the ISAAA report.
"GM seeds and the pesticides used with them are much too expensive for Africa's small farmers," he said in a statement.
GM seeds cost two to over four times as much conventional, non-biotech seeds, he said.
The rising grain prices behind the world food crisis have allowed biotech giants such as Monsanto to dramatically increase the price of GM seeds and chemicals they sell to farmers, Friends of the Earth charged.
Monsanto is the world's largest seed firm and also markets Roundup, the biggest selling herbicide.
Soybean continued to be the principal biotech crop in 2008, occupying 53 percent of global biotech area, followed by maize (30 percent), cotton (12 percent) and canola (five percent), said the ISAAA, which has been tracking global biotech crop adoption trends since the technology's inception in 1996.
It said that Egypt, Burkina Faso, Bolivia, Brazil and Australia had introduced for the first time biotech crops already commercialized in other countries.
Of the global biotech farmers in 2008, more than 90 percent or 12.3 million were small and resource-poor farmers from developing countries.
Others were large farmers from both industrialized nations such as the United States and Canada and developing countries such as Argentina and Brazil. The United States produces more than half of the world?s GM crops.
Of the small farmers, most were cotton farmers in China and India. Others were from countries such as the Philippines and South Africa.
The largest increase in the number of biotech farmers in 2008 was in India.
In Europe, while France did not plant biotech crops in 2008, seven other EU countries increased their planting 21 percent to again total more than 100,000 hectares, "a milestone reached for the first time in 2007," the ISAAA said.
It also said that the number of growers benefiting from the technology might soon "jump sharply."
Initial reports from China indicate the use of biotech cotton to control the bollworm was also suppressing the pest in other crops like maize, wheat and vegetables, allowing a potential 10 million additional growers to benefit from the technology, the ISAAA said.
But Friends of the Earth argued that "despite more than a decade of hype, the biotechnology industry has not introduced a single GM crop with increased yield, enhanced nutrition, drought-tolerance or salt-tolerance.
"Disease-resistant GM crops are practically non-existent."
