Cheaper GM Seeds Could Boost Adoption, Farm Benefits and Company Profits: The Case of Bt Cotton in Argentina

Bt cotton is a GM crop into which a gene of the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis has been transferred to make it resistant to major lepidopteran insect pests. It was developed by the US company Monsanto and, as one of the first GM crop technologies, it became commercially available in the mid1990s. Since then, the technology has spread rapidly in the US, Australia, as well as in several developing countries. In Argentina, Bt cotton is patented by Monsanto and was released in 1998 by Genética Mandiyú, a joint venture between Monsanto, Delta and Pine Land (D&PL), and the local company Ciagro. Unlike other countries, however, in Argentina the diffusion of Bt cotton has been rather slow. According to official statistics, four years after its introduction, Bt technology only covered about 5% of the national cotton area (Table 1). This Vol. IV No. 1 2004