Are Biotech Foods Safe?

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By 2007, more than 70 biotech plant varieties had been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for commercial cultivation in the United States. Approved crops include canola, corn, cotton, papaya, plum, potato, tomato, soybean, squash, and several others. They express a range of improved traits, such as heightened resistance to certain insects and diseases, tolerance to herbicides, and longer shelf life. Although farmers have not readily adopted some varieties, 73 percent of all corn, 91 percent of all soybeans, and 87 percent of all upland cotton grown in the United States in 2007 were biotech varieties.

Globally, more than 282 million acres of biotech crops are grown by some 12 million farmers in 23 countries.  And, while the early adoption of biotech crops was centered in the U.S., Canada, and Argentina, today over 90 percent of those growing biotech crops are small-scale, resource-poor farmers in less-developed countries, such as China, India, Paraguay, South Africa, and the Philippines.

While individual farmer experiences vary from region to region, and from crop to crop, the varieties of canola, corn, cotton, and soybean that make up the bulk of adopted biotech crops have been modified to control insect pests, weeds, and pathogens. In the United States alone, the planting of biotech crops in 2005 increased food and animal feed production by 8.3 billion pounds, lowered production costs by $1.4 billion dollars, and reduced pesticide use by 69.7 million pounds of active ingredient.

Among the most important environmental benefits are the reduction in the use of synthetic chemical insecticides that results from insect-resistant biotech crops, and the preservation of topsoil that results from the adoption of conservation tillage practices made easier by herbicide-tolerant biotech crops.  Insect-resistant biotech cotton varieties, for example, have substantially lowered pesticide use and increased yields, especially in less developed countries. Biotech cotton in China has reduced the quantity of pesticides applied to cotton by more than 75 percent compared to conventional varieties. As a direct consequence, farmers who planted biotech varieties reported only one-sixth as many pesticide poisonings per capita than those who planted only conventional cotton.

Herbicide-tolerant biotech crops allow farmers to apply a specific chemical herbicide spray over fields without damaging the growing crop.  In addition to substantial cost savings for farmers, perhaps the biggest benefit is the maintenance of soil health.  Because weeds can be managed effectively without mechanical tillage, the use of herbicide-tolerant crops facilitates the adoption of conservation tillage practices, which reduce the loosening and erosion topsoil by up to 90 percent compared with plowing. 

Herbicide-tolerant crops can, and have, been bred using such conventional techniques as mutation breeding, and many varieties have proven popular (and uncontroversial) in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia.  Creating herbicide-tolerant crops is more efficient and more effective, however, using recombinant DNA.  And the herbicides used in biotech varieties are generally considered “environmentally-friendly” because they degrade quickly and have extremely low toxicity.  Consequently, just shifting to those herbicides has its own environmental benefits.