Plant virus diseases cause severe constraints on the productivity of a wide range of economically important crops worldwide. In India the Green Revolution ushered in intensive agricultural practices and reduced varietal diversity, resulting in the emergence of viral diseases at an alarming pace in the cultivated crops. Some such diseases, which are especially relevant to India, along with their...

Transgenic modification of plants is a key enabling technology for developing sustainable biofeedstocks for biofuels production. Regulatory decisions and the wider acceptance and development of transgenic biofeedstock crops are considered from the context of science-based risk assessment. The risk assessment paradigm for transgenic biofeedstock crops is fundamentally no different from that of c...

Transgenic crops are now grown commercially in 25 countries worldwide. Although pathogens represent major constraints for the growth of many crops, only a tiny proportion of these transgenic crops carry disease resistance traits. Nevertheless, transgenic disease-resistant plants represent approximately 10% of the total number of approved field trials in North America, a proportion that has rema...

Until today, herbicide-tolerant (HT) transgenic crops have been the most widely used type of transgenic crops. In 2008, worldwide, 63% of all agricultural land devoted to transgenic crops involved HT transgenic ones, and the percentage was higher (85%) when the herbicide-tolerant trait was stacked with another. In addition, other HT crops are foreseen within the next five years if we are to bel...

The large-scale commercial cultivation of transgenic crops has undergone a steady increase since their introduction 10 years ago. Most of these crops bear introduced traits that are of agronomic importance, such as herbicide or insect resistance. These traits are likely to impact upon the use of pesticides on these crops, as well as the pesticide market as a whole. Organizations like USDA-ERS a...

the era of transgenic breeding or GMO technologies, the 21st century is silently turning to non-transgenic breeding or non-GMO technologies. Due to significant regulatory issues, cost of development and technology constraints, transgenic breeding technologies have been limited to a few crops grown on large acreages, i.e. about 10% of the available cultivated acres globally1. The promise of non-...

THE unprecedented rapid adoption of transgenic crops during the initial five-year period (1996 to 2000) when genetically modified (GM) crops were first adopted, reflects the significant multiple benefits realized by large and small farmers in industrial and developing countries that have grown transgenic crops commercially. Between 1996 and 2000, a total of fifteen countries – 10 industrial and...

Global adoption of transgenic crops reached 67.7 million hectares in 2003 from 2.8 million in 1996. Delivery has occurred almost entirely through the private sector and adoption has been rapid in areas where the crops addressed serious production constraints and where farmers had access to the new technologies. Three countries (USA, Argentina and Canada), three crops (soybean, cotton and maize)...

The co-existence of conventional and transgenic products in the food chain introduces new elements in the evaluation of the profitability of transgenic crops and, consequently, on the farmer’s adoption decision. In particular, one emerging problem farmers are facing in Europe is related to the legal liability of transgenic-crop cultivation. In Europe, a mixture of ex-ante regulations and ex-pos...