The Research, Development, Commercialization, and Adoption of Drought and Stress-Tolerant Crops - Crop Improvement Under Adverse Conditions - page 26

Table 1.4 Registered field
trials of transgenic crops with
drought- and stress-tolerance
traits (cumulative totals
through mid-2011)

Country/Region Stress tolerance field trials

United States 1,386

Canada 1,003

Australia 17

India 9

Japan 7

Europe 14

Spain 6

France 3

Germany 2

United Kingdom 1

Sweden 1

Hungary 1

Africa 11

South Africa 6

Egypt 3

Uganda 1

Kenya 1

of drought-tolerant crops were available for African countries. The most obvious
deficiencies, given the rates of publication and patenting by country, observed in
the preceding sections were due to our inability to access field trial data from China
(Huang and Wang 2002 ) or Brazil (http://www.ctnbio.gov.br/index.php).
Table 1.4 tallies the numbers of field trials in each country of transgenic varieties
involving stress-tolerance traits. The immediate contrast that stands out is between
the number of stress tolerance trials in the US and Canada versus all other countries,
suggesting that late stage development activity in North America is two orders of
magnitude greater than in most other parts of the world. Again, however, we are not
observing field trials of stress-tolerant crops developed by breeding programs, nor
are we seeing transgenic field trials conducted in China, Brazil, and possibly other
countries where they may be significant.
Field trials of stress-tolerant crops really began in 1998, with an initial surge
of field trials largely driven by the public sector (Fig. 1.2c ). If we decompose the
annual field trials into type of stress trait being tested (Fig. 1.5a ) and type of crop
being tested (Fig. 1.5b ), we see that most of those early 1998-2003 field trials
were designated as general stress tolerance in forage plants. Indeed, most of that
early surge was driven by just one program, at the University of Guelph (Guelph,
Ontario). More recently, since 2004 there has been significant growth in field trials
of stress-tolerant crops, almost all occurring in the private sector (Fig. 1.2c ) largely
focused on drought tolerance (Fig. 1.5a ) and mostly in grains, but with a very recent
surge in 2009 and 2010 in oilseeds (Fig. 1.5b ).
Examining numbers of field trials of different types of crops tolerant to different
types of stress, conducted by different types of organizations (Table 1.5 ) shows that
efforts in the public sector are relatively spread out across traits and crops, while
corporations are relatively focused on drought tolerance in grains and oilseeds. We
see, perhaps surprisingly, entrepreneurial companies more diversified than corpora-