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Enhanced advocacy for agricultural biotechnology is needed.

Agricultural biotechnology is a crucial tool for transforming global food systems to meet the United Nation’s goal of ensuring zero hunger by 2030. Evidence abounds that biotechnology has had a positive overall impact on agriculture in the areas where it has been employed. If adopted more widely across the globe, it could be instrumental in meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, which aims to end world hunger, boost nutrition and support agricultural sustainability within the next nine years. GMO technology is working for farmers. In Bangladesh for example, there's been a s... Lire la suiteix-fold increase in income that farmers in Bangladesh have earned as a result of growing Bt eggplant, an important food crop genetically modified to resist the destructive fruit and shoot borer pest without the application of insecticides. More opportunities must be created for farmers to access crop biotechnology if the world’s food systems are to be transformed to meet the challenge of feeding the more than 811 million people who suffer hunger across the globe. It is high time for us all to come forward and allow people to innovate and use GM technology for food security and sustainability. Given the world’s high population growth, limited land for agricultural production and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it will be more challenging to achieve the SDG on hunger, Hossain said, adding that all options that can help deal with food insecurity should be explored. Between 1996 and 2018 produced an additional 824 million tonnes of food, feed and fiber worldwide. He said farmers earned an extra US$225 billion in income by growing GM crops during that same period, while reducing the use of agricultural pesticides by 8.6 percent, resulting in a 19 percent cut in associated environmental impacts. The technology also helped reduce carbon emissions equal to taking 15.3 million cars off the road. Because GM crops increase yields, if they had not been available during that time some 24.2 million extra hectares of land would have been destroyed to make way for the same amount of crop production, he noted. There is a growing range of gene editing research that is focused on crops and traits that have been almost impossible to tackle using conventional breeding technologies. There is a quick rise in use of CRISPR technology in crop improvement to ensure agronomic value, food and feed quality, biotic stress tolerance, herbicide tolerance, abiotic stress adaptations, enhance breeding, etc. These applications are looking at problems that have been difficult to tackle over the years. Lire moins

There is the need for agricultural biotechnology to be recognised as one of the key tools that can revolutionarize agricultural production. GMOs and gene editing tools should be accepted in the agricultural value chain globally.

It explored the role that advanced innovations like biotechnology can be used to improve upon food systems.