Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
worldwide soy, 14 percent of the worldwide corn, and 18 percent of the
worldwide rapeseed production were GM in 2005 (Transgen, 2005).
An overview of the costs of GMO testing regimes in different bran-
ches of the German food and feed industry is given in Table 9. Although
there are only rather small differences in the average costs of single tests
(both for qualitative and quantitative GMO testing), the number of tests
carried out differs significantly by the different branches. Although the
total costs of GMO testing differ strongly between the branches (with
around 1,200
/year in the feed
industry), these differences are widely smoothened when setting these
costs in relation to the turnover of the companies, being the highest with
0.02 percent in the milling industry (Table 9). This indicates that the
direct costs of GMO testing are rather limited so far in the German food
and feed industry - not least due to the limited number of approved GM
varieties in the EU. However, it should be considered that higher costs
of raw materials, additional personnel costs, or costs for changing the
organization or the processing regime in a factory are not included in the
costs shown in Table 9.
/year in the bakery industry and 14,600
€
€
5. Conclusions
In recent years there have been several studies targeting to analyze the
cost effects and wider economic impacts of coexistence of GM crops with
conventional and organic crops in Europe and overseas (e.g., Bock et
al., 2002; Tolstrup et al., 2003; Mess ean et al., 2006). In addition, there
are two EU-financed integrated projects in place (SIGMEA and Co-
Extra) that intend to analyze organization and costs of coexistence mea-
sures between GM and non-GM crops in agriculture and the food indus-
try. These studies show that potential costs of coexistence schemes occur
on different levels (e.g., on a single farm, a region, the agricultural sec-
tor, or the agro-food chain of a specific country or internationally) and
that different types of costs have to be distinguished when assessing the
