Genetically-modified (GM) varieties of crops, notably soybean, maize, rape (canola) and cotton were first grown commercially in 1996. In 2010 they occupied 148 million ha in 29 countries, mostly in the Americas and Asia but with an obvious absence in Europe where their introduction has been controversial due to concerns about environmental impairment and adverse impacts on human health. This pa...

Although manioc is well adapted to nutrient-poor Oxisols of Amazonia, ethnobotanical observations show that bitter manioc is also frequently cultivated in the highly fertile soils of the floodplains and Amazonian dark earths (ADE) along the middle Madeira River. Because different sets of varieties are grown in each soil type, and there are agronomic similarities between ADE and floodplain varie...

Field trials are extremely important for all facets of research, breeding, and biotechnology. Tree physiology is distinctively different in greenhouses or growth chambers vs. field environments. Thus, results from non-field environments can be very misleading with respect to identification of promising biotechnologies and elite varieties. Large regulatory impediments to conduct of field tests o...

van der Voet et al. (2011) describe statistical methodology that the European Food Safety Authority expects an applicant to adopt when making a GM crop regulatory submission. Key to their proposed methodology is the inclusion of reference varieties in the experimental design to provide a measure of natural variation amongst commercially grown crops. While taking proper account of natural variat...

Genetically modified, i.e. transgenic crops, are now being grown on several million acres throughout the world, mainly in North America. Most of these ‘first generation’ products have specific agronomic traits designed to improve the efficiency of production. For example herbicide tolerant soybean and insect resistant corn are the two most widely grown transgenic crops. Increasingly, the new tr...