The Political Economy of Regulation of Biotechnology in Agriculture - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 693

Extent of Adoption of GM Crops by
Industrialized and Poor Countries
The year 2013 marked the eighteenth year of commercial cultivation of transgenic
crops.25 That year, transgenic crops were grown on 175 million hectares (ha) world-
wide, which represented a one hundred-fold increase in land area planted over 1996,
which was the first year transgenic crops were grown commercially. James (2013)
reports that 18 million farmers grew transgenic crops in 2013, of which 90% were small-
holder, resource-poor farmers. These crops were grown in twenty-seven countries, of
which only eight were industrialized nations. Herbicide tolerant (HT) crops made up
approximately 55%, insect resistant (IR) crops made up about 18%, and stacked traits
(HT+IR) comprised 27% of global plantings. In addition, 2,000 farmers planted the first
transgenic drought tolerant maize on 50,000 ha of land in the United States. The aver-
age adoption rate for all transgenic crops in the United States exceeded 90%. India and
China had Bt cotton adoption rates of 95% and 90%, respectively. In Canada, the adop-
tion rate for GM canola was 96%. In the European Union (EU), five countries (Spain,
Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic) grew Bt maize (MON810), 94%
of which was grown in Spain (an adoption rate of 31%). James (2013) cites onerous regu-
lation (EU coexistence policy, CEC, 2003) as restricting expansion of transgenic crop
cultivation in Romania, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. The adoption rates reported
reveal the fastest adoption rate of any crop technology to date, far exceeding the rates
tested in an EU-Joint Research Centre study (Bock et al., 2002), where co-existence
was already deemed “virtually impossible” if the threshold for adventitious presence26
of GM in non-GM seed, grain, or food were to be set at 0.1% (the analytical detection
limit). With high global adoption rates and the inability to control adventitious pres-
ence, the potential for adverse economic impacts on GM non-adopters and the poten-
tial for “precluding producer and consumer choice” are high.
New Challenges to Co-existence Posed
by GM Crops
Coexistence between conventional and organic farmers with regard to chemical pesti-
cides has been possible in most cases because these chemicals are expected to ultimately
dissipate in the environment—with some notable exceptions (Rosner and Markowitz
2013). With transgenic crops, a new set of issues has come to the fore. These issues are
based on (1) the ability of GM seeds to reproduce and multiply in the environment,
thus amplifying their presence over time and space, and (2) the ability of GM crops to
cross-pollinate with compatible non-GM crops, a process called gene-low —the passing