Philippine seen approving golden rice in two years

Dr. Clive James, chairman of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA,) said such imprimatur would “generate life-saving humanitarian benefits as 6,000 people a day, mainly women and children, die from complications resulting from vitamin-A deficiency.”

James said that in spite of what detractors said, the rate of adoption of biotech crops “in developing countries dwarfs that of industrialized nations.”

He said that of the 29 countries that adopted biotech crops in 2011, 19 were developing countries and 10 were industrialized nations.

“China and India lead Asian adoption, Brazil and Argentina lead Latin American adoption, and South Africa leads adoption on the continent of Africa. A growth rate for biotech crops in developing countries at 11 percent, or 8.2 million hectares during 2011, was twice as fast and twice as large as industrial countries at 5 percent or 3.8 million hectares,” James said.

Developing countries grew approximately 50 percent of global biotech crops in 2011 and are expected to exceed industrial countries’ land area devoted to the crops this year.

More than 90 percent of farmers planting biotech crops worldwide or more than 15 million, are small resource-poor farmers in developing countries, up 8 percent or 1.3 million since 2010, James said.

He said that in the near term, the biggest driver of global biotech crop adoption will be Brazil followed by China once approval to commercialize biotech corn in China is in place, which could be as early as 2013.

Brazil, second only to the US in total land area planted to biotech crops, has a science-based, effective and responsible fast-track approval system for biotech crops and will also benefit from a rich pipeline of new biotech crops coming from transnationals, public-private partnerships (PPP) and its own public-sector research institution EMBRAPA, James said.

Brazil has already approved, for the first time, a “stacked” biotech soybean tolerant to herbicides and resistant to insect pests and initial commercialization could begin as early as the end of 2012 when planting gets underway in the southern hemisphere, the ISAAA chairman said.

China already has seven million small farmers growing biotech cotton successfully and recently assigned priority for corn so that China can benefit from enhanced biotech maize that will increase meat productivity and make the country more self-sufficient on animal feed.

As China is becoming more prosperous, more meat is being consumed which in turn creates more demand for the feed crops, corn and soybean, James said.