Against the background of increasing awareness and appreciation of issues such as global warming and the impact of mankind's activities such as agriculture on the global environment, this paper updates previous assessments of some key environmental impacts that crop biotechnology has had on global agriculture. It focuses on the environmental impacts associated with changes in pesticide use and ...

Bush has not hidden his fury at Europe’s refusal to import American GM food. He expects Mr Blair’s unthinking support...Top officials privately admit the overriding considerations in reaching the decision were to avoid handing a victory to environmentalists and critical newspapers such as the Daily Mail, to avoid displeasing President Bush — and to save Mr Blair from embarrassment.” There was s...

In a 1989 study, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) determined that organophosphate pesticides used in orchard dormant spraying were being deposited on non-target row crops grown at distances less than and greater than 0.4 km from the site of pesticide application. The residues found on non-targeted crops may have been the result of drift during pesticide application or tr...

Farmers’ awareness of beneficial and harmful effects of pesticides and factors determining use of pesticides were analyzed using survey data from 21 villages in three agro-ecological regions of Bangladesh. Pesticide cost accounts for about 7.7 percent of the gross value of output in cotton, 3.6 percent in vegetables, 2.5 percent in potato, 1.8 percent in modern rice, 1.6 percent in spices and l...

Most analyses of pesticide residues in foods are being performed in Raw Agricultural Commodities (RAC) for a variety of purposes, which include regulatory monitoring, import/export certification, risk assessment, field-application trials, organic food verification, and marketing to consumers. The levels of the positive detections in these analyses are generally being estimated on the basis of e...

Researchers, such as Headley (1968) and Campbell (1976) have shown empirically that chemical pesticides have played a major role in increasing agricultural productivity. However, there is concern that chemical pesticides may contaminate ground and surface water, have harmful effects on wildlife, leave residues on agricultural products, and cause health risks to farm workers (Harper and Zilberma...

Transforming modern agriculture towards both higher yields and greater sustainability is critical for preserving biodiversity in an increasingly populous and variable world. However, the intensity of agricultural practices varies strongly between crop systems. Given limited research capacity, it is crucial to focus efforts to increase sustainability in the crop systems that need it most. In thi...

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)...

BACKGROUND Farmworkers have a high risk for acute pesticide-related illness and injury, and the rate among female farmworkers is approximately twice as high as that among males. Surveillance data were used to identify reasons for this gender difference. METHODS We identified acute pesticide-related illness and injury cases among farmworkers from the Sentinel Event Notification System for Occu...