Brazilian state of Mato Grosso has more area under GMO than India

Brazil’s largest producer of grains and fibers and the ninth largest producer of soybean in the world, the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso also boasts of the largest area under genetically-modified crop in the country. 

 

During the 2015/16 season, nearly 12.68 million hectares of GMO were planted, including soybeans, corn and cotton. If Mato Grosso was a country, it would be the fourth largest, with a GMO area bigger than the one in India. 

 

If it was a country, Mato Grosso would be only behind the United States (70.9 million hectares), Brazil (44.2 million hectares) and Argentina (24.5 million hectares) in the global ranking of transgenic adoption, which lists 28 countries. 

 

In Brazil, besides Mato Grosso, Paraná (7.23 million hectares) and Rio Grande do Sul (5.53 million hectares) are emerged prominently in the data from the last International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications.

 

In Mato Grosso, the GMO soybeans occupied 9.07 million hectares in the last season, with almost the entire area under the oilseed (99.3 percent). In comparison with corn crop, spread over 3.36 million hectares, 3.17 million hectares were covered with transgenic seeds. 

 

Besides Mato Grosso, the cereal was grown in the states of Paraná where 2.35 million hectares of the 2.55 million hectares were planted in 2015/16, followed by Mato Grosso do Sul which planted 1.45 million hectares with GMO varieties out of the 1.55 million hectares planted. As for cotton, the state of Mato Grosso put 440,000 hectares under transgenic varieties out of a total of 580,000 hectares. This was followed by Bahia with 200,000 of the total 290,000 hectares under cotton, and finally came Goiás. 

 

The executive-director of the Council of Information on Biotechnology, Adriana Brondani, the state was taking on a protagonist’s role since it pursues agriculture as a vocation and believes in deploying technologies adapted to the region. 

 

“The high index of transgenic adoption in Mato Grosso reveals that the farmers recognize the efficacy of these seeds and are sure about its safety,” said analysts.