TATT Biotech Counter surpasses 3 billionth acre planted

The Biotech Counter at the Truth About Trade & Technology (TATT) website passed the 3 billion acres planted milestone on Friday November 4, 2011.

As TATT Global Farmer Network member Richard Dijkstra (2011 Global Farmer Roundtable) from Brazil says in this week’s column, Three Billion Acres of GM Crops and Counting!, it most likely happened in South America where planting season is underway.  It will never be known exactly where and by whom it was planted.  But the perspective is amazing as Dijkstrs explains:

“How big is 3 billion acres? It’s bigger than the Amazon rainforest. It’s bigger than all of Brazil. It’s big enough to say with absolute certainty that biotechnology is now a thoroughly conventional variety of agriculture.” 

He’s right.  It wasn’t all that long ago that GM crops made their debut in 1996  The adoption of the technology has been fast, and after the first billion acres were planted it didn’t take all that long to reach the 2 billion, and now we’re at the 3 billion mark.  The economic and environmental benefits have been proven and today it is conventional and accepted.  Otherwise the technology wouldn’t have been adopted by millions of large and small-scale farmers worldwide – as Clive James’ research shows from his Global Status of Commercialized Biotech / GM Crops: 2010:

“Of the 15.4 million farmers using the technology in 2010, 14.4 million were small-scale, resource-poor farmers in developing countries; these farmers are some of the poorest people in the world and biotech crops are contributing to the alleviation of their poverty, according to James. China and India now have the most small-scale farmers using biotech crops, with 6.5 million Chinese farmers and 6.3 million Indian farmers planting biotech crop seed. Remarkably, over the last 15 years, farmers worldwide have made 100 million independent decisions to plant biotech crops.”

The Biotech Counters at the TATT website are found along the right side of the website’s pages.  The counters continuously track the number of acres planted and harvested with biotech crops worldwide.  Ross Korves who authors the Trade Policy Analysis each week for TATT calibrates them, using a variety of official statistics and research to determine and authenticate the rates over the past several years, starting in 2005.

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