Agricultural Biotechnology

Agricultural Biotechnology Detail

More than a decade of global GM crop cultivation has demonstrated that agricultural biotechnology can, and already does, play a positive role in meeting these challenges. Thanks to the green revolution of the 1960s, the issue of food security still seems irrelevant to most of us in the EU, having escaped the experience of real food shortages and hunger. Indeed, for much of the last 20 years, policy-makers have focused on how to reduce Europe’s grain mountains and wine lakes – we were producing too much, not too little. There has been a shift in focus towards the environmental sustainability of modern agriculture and agricultural biotechnology which has required a change in mentality from the age of subsidies linked to production.
Nevertheless, with a global population that is set to reach nine billion by 2050, there is a general consensus that Europe must play its part in the global supply of food and increase its current agricultural production and agricultural biotechnology has a role. Innovation in crop breeding has allowed farmers to successfully meet this familiar challenge in the past. Now, given the likely impacts of climate change on agricultural productivity and the role played by agricultural practices in contributing to global warming, it is clear that farmers will have to go to greater lengths to produce food in a sustainable manner. Once again, innovation in the agricultural sector, including the development and employment of agricultural biotechnology, can help farmers achieve this goal. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that today more than 14 million farmers around the world have used agricultural biotechnology and are growing around 134 million hectares of GM crops.

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