Biotechnology has had an important impact on the agricultural and food industries over the last twelve years by way of fast and extensive adoption of a few genetically modified (GM) crops. This has produced large efficiency gains, including higher yields and reduced costs of weed and pest control, as well as some environmental benefits. The expected development of crops with additional agronomi...

The ISU Crop Bioengineering Consortium (CBC) was organized to address the urgent, grand challenge to provide sufficient food, feed, biofuels and biorenewable chemicals for the world’s burgeoning population, through basic and applied research, to enable the bioengineering of valuable traits in a variety of crops. Importantly, the novel technologies employed can produce bioengineered crops that c...

The ongoing debate about the use of genetically-modified (GM) crops in agriculture has largely focused on food safety and genetic contamination issues. Given that the majority of GM crops have been produced to respond to the problem of crop yield reductions caused by diseases, insects and weeds, the paper argues that in those cases, the currently used GM crops are an unstable solution to the pr...

Changes in the global production of major crops are important drivers of food prices, food security and land use decisions. Average global yields for these commodities are determined by the performance of crops in millions of fields distributed across a range of management, soil and climate regimes. Despite the complexity of global food supply, here we show that simple measures of growing seaso...

1Département des sciences animales, Faculté des sciences de l’agriculture et de l’alimentation, Université Laval, Sainte-Foy, Québec, Canada G1K 7P4; 2Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Soils and Crops Research and Development Centre, Sainte-Foy, Quebec, Canada G1V 2J3 (e-mail: [email protected]); and 3Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Dairy and Swine Research and Development Centre, Lennoxvi...

without any scientific basis. About 20 years ago, researchers In response to requests by small scale cane growers of KwaZulu-Natal for advice on i~nproving their system of crop production, a Joint Project between SASEX and the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Agricul~ure was started in 1996. Trials were initiated to investigate the practicalitics of intercropping rainfed and irrigated cane with food...

Advocates of biotechnology affirm that the application of genetic engineering to develop transgenic crops will increase world agricultural productivity, enhance food security, and move agriculture away from a dependence on chemical inputs helping to reduce environmental problems. This paper challenges such assertions by first demystifying the Malthusian view that hunger is due to a gap between ...

*Correspondence: Lars Olof Björn, Department of Biology, Molecular Cell Biology, Lund University, Sölvegatan 35, SE-22362 Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] Guangdong Province in China runs a risk of gradually increasing pollution of its agricultural land and, as a consequence, toxic agricultural products. We concentrate here on the situation for cadmium, copper, and lead. For the...

The development of genetically modified (GM) crops has prompted widespread debate regarding both human safety and environmental issues. Food crops produced by modern biotechnology using recombinant techniques usually differ from their conventional counterparts only in respect of one or a few desirable genes, as opposed to the use of traditional breeding methods which mix thousands of genes and ...