Australia: End of GM ban 'a great step forward' for New South Wales farmers and biotech companies

By David Claughton, Lara Webster, and Hugh Hogan Biotech lobby group CropLife is hailing the lifting of a ban on genetically modified (GM) food crops in New South Wales as a "great step forward", but after 18 years in limbo the state's agricultural sector has some catching up to do. Around the world, the growth in GM crops is beginning to accelerate. Almost 200 million hectares of GM crops were planted in 2019 in 29 countries, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), a non profit group working to share biotechnology with developing countries. "Biotech crops are considered the fastest adopted crop technology in the history of modern agriculture," it said in a 2019 report. Most of the corn, soybean, and cotton in the United States is GM and leads the world in the area sown to GM crops, followed by Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and India. Ninety five per cent of the livestock in the US are eating GM feed and US consumers are ...