Claims have been made recently that glyphosate-resistant (GR) crops sometimes have mineral deficiencies and increased plant disease. This review evaluates the literature that is germane to these claims. Our conclusions are: (1) although there is conflicting literature on the effects of glyphosate on mineral nutrition on GR crops, most of the literature indicates that mineral nutrition in GR cro...

Hectares of genetically modified (GM) crops have increased exponentially since 1996, when such crops began to be commercialized. GM biotechnology, together with conventional breeding, has become the main approach to improving agronomic traits of crops. However, people are concerned about the safety of GM crops, especially GM-derived food and feed. Many efforts have been made to evaluate the uni...

The intensification of agriculture has provided cheaper more plentiful food, but has also caused declines in farmland wildlife. The introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops may exacerbate this, or offer new ways of mitigating anthropogenic impacts. The potential consequences of the introduction of GM crops have been studied for over a decade, since commercialization. Although the specifi...

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is the world’s commonest cause of childhood blindness. More than half of these cases occur in developing countries. Animal sourced foods though good sources of vitamin A are too expensive for poor rural people. Crops biofortified with provitamin A offer a convenient and accessible source of vitamin A. The other micronutrient programs of fortification and supplementati...

The New Crops Program of Virginia State University, established in 1991, has evaluated the production feasibility of a wide array of leguminous crops including chickpea, faba bean, mungbean, and pigeonpea under Virginia’s agro-climatic conditions (Bhardwaj et al. 1996). Such crops could provide alternatives to farmers in Virginia and adjoining Mid-Atlantic States. These farmers, in general, rel...

Can public policies and research institutions in African countries provide safe and useful genetically modified (GM) food crops? This is an urgent question, recognizing that advancing GM food crops can be difficult, affected by global debate, and various regulatory protocols. Reaching farmers has been achieved in several countries only for GM cotton for insect resistant while approvals for food...

Herbicide use is among the most criticized aspects of modern farming, especially as it relates to genetically engineered (GE) crops. Many previous analyses have used flawed metrics to evaluate herbicide intensity and toxicity trends. Here, I show that herbicide use intensity increased over the last 25 years in maize, cotton, rice and wheat. Although GE crops have been previously implicated in i...

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...

In the US, the cultivated area (hectares) and production (tonnes) of crops that require or benefit from insect pollination (directly dependent crops: apples, almonds, blueberries, cucurbits, etc.) increased from 1992, the first year in this study, through 1999 and continued near those levels through 2009; aggregate yield (tonnes/hectare) remained unchanged. The value of directly dependent crops...

Horticultural crops are an important part of agriculture for food as well as nutritional security. However, several pests and diseases along with adverse abiotic environmental factors pose a severe threat to these crops by affecting their quality and productivity. This warrants the effective and accelerated breeding programs by utilizing innovative biotechnological tools that can tackle aforeme...