Even as the debate over the safety of genetic modification rages on, farmers worldwide are voting with their pockets as they continue to plant more biotech crops. For 2017, global hectarage of biotech (bt) crops increased 4.7 million hectares over the previous year i.e. from 185.1 million hectares to 189.8 million hectares, an increase of three percent.
Even as the debate over the safety of genetic modification rages on, farmers worldwide are voting with their pockets as they continue to plant more biotech crops. For 2017, global hectarage of biotech (bt) crops increased 4.7 million hectares over the previous year i.e. from 185.1 million hectares to 189.8 million hectares, an increase of three percent.
Since 1996 when biotech crops were first commercialized, the cumulative hectarage has reached 2.3 billion hectares. This is a staggering 11,200 percent increase from the initial plantings of 1.7 million hectares. This phenomenon makes biotech crops the fastest growing agricultural technology innovation in recent memory.
These figures come from the latest update on the “Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops in 2017,” published by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), an international non-government organization (NGO) based in Los Baños, which until recently was headed by an outstanding Filipino scientist, Dr. Randy Hautea, who just passed away.
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