Washington, DC, USA
March 4, 2014

Source: Amber Waves
by Jorge Fernandez-Cornejo, Seth James Wechsler, and Michael Livingston

Genetically engineered (GE) crops with pest management traits first became commercially available for major crops in 1996. More than 15 years later, adoption of these crop varieties by U.S. farmers is widespread (170 million acres planted in 2013), and many products derived from these GE crops—including cornmeal, oils, and sugars—are commonly used in food products. While some GE seeds with traits that affect a crop’s nutritional content and agronomic properties are already being commercialized and many more GE seeds are under development and testing, nearly all the GE seeds marketed to date to U.S. farmers are for pest management (pests here are defined to include insects, weeds, and some other organisms that interfere with the production of crops). Herbicide-tolerant (HT) seeds allow farmers to use certain effective herbicides to control weeds without damaging their crop. Other GE seeds leverage pesticidal proteins, naturally produced by the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), that are toxic to certain insects, protecting the plant over its entire life.

U.S. farmers tend to adopt HT seeds more than seeds with insect resistance partly because weeds are a pervasive problem. HT adoption was particularly rapid in soybeans, with U.S. farmers planting HT soybeans on 93 percent of all soybean acreage in 2013. HT cotton occupied 82 percent of cotton acreage and HT corn 85 percent of corn acreage in 2013. Insect infestations tend to be more localized than weed infestations. Farmers planted Bt cotton (engineered to control insects such as tobacco budworm, bollworm, and pink bollworm) on 75 percent of cotton acreage in 2013. Bt corn—which controls the European corn borer, the corn rootworm, and the corn earworm—was planted on 76 percent of corn acres in 2013.

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Website: http://www.ers.usda.gov/

Published: March 10, 2014