Agriculture is under pressure to produce greater quantities of food, feed and biofuel on limited land resources. Current over-reliance on a handful of major staple crops has inherent agronomic, ecological, nutritional and economic risks and is probably unsustainable in the long run. Wider use of today’s underutilized minor crops provides more options to build temporal and spatial heterogeneity ...

BACKGROUND Growers have enthusiastically embraced crops genetically modified to express Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) proteins for insect control because they provide excellent protection from key damaging insect pests around the world. Bt crops also offer superior environmental and health benefits while increasing grower income. However, insect resistance development is an important concern for ...

Whether or not to require labeling of food produced from crops that are genetically modified (GM) using recombinant DNA technology is a key issue in the ongoing debate over the risks and benefits of using biotechnology in agriculture. The U.S. government regulates GM food technologies, but once GM crops are approved they are considered to be ‘substantially equivalent’ to their conventional coun...

Genetically modified (GM) herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops have been largely adopted where they have been authorized. Nevertheless, they are fiercely criticized by some, notably because of the herbicide use associated with them. However, how much herbicide is applied to GMHT crops compared to conventional crops, and what impacts does the use of herbicide have? The paper first presents some factors...

In recent years agricultural practices in New England have undergone dramatic changes. Traditional dryland crops such as potatoes and silage corn have been replaced by irrigated “landscape” crops; specifically turf and nursery crops. For example, commercial sod production in Rhode Island has risen from 200 acres in 1972 to over 2,500 acres in 1986, while potato acreage has shown a similm declin...

Knowledge about the crop biology of economic crops in Africa is needed for regulators to accurately review dossiers and conduct comprehensive environmental risk assessments (ERAs). This information allows regulators to decide whether biotech crops present a risk to biodiversity, since crossing between domesticated crops and their wild relatives could affect the adaptations of the wild species. ...

Future food security in Sub-Saharan Africa requires enhancement of its crop production. Transgenic crops with a poverty focus can enhance harvests and are available for staples such as cooking bananas and plantains. One constraint is optimisation of national biosafety processes to support rapid and safe uptake of such beneficial crops. Africa needs streamlined regulation supporting deployment o...

Transgenic modification of plants is a key enabling technology for developing sustainable biofeedstocks for biofuels production. Regulatory decisions and the wider acceptance and development of transgenic biofeedstock crops are considered from the context of science-based risk assessment. The risk assessment paradigm for transgenic biofeedstock crops is fundamentally no different from that of c...

Various crops can be considered as potential bioenergy and biofuel production feedstocks. The selection of the crops to be cultivated for that purpose is based on several factors. For an objective comparison between different crops, a common framework is required to assess their economic or energetic performance. In this paper, a computational tool for the energy cost evaluation of multiple-cro...

Transgenic crops are now grown commercially in 25 countries worldwide. Although pathogens represent major constraints for the growth of many crops, only a tiny proportion of these transgenic crops carry disease resistance traits. Nevertheless, transgenic disease-resistant plants represent approximately 10% of the total number of approved field trials in North America, a proportion that has rema...