Top year for biotech crops, but hunger unabated

HONOLULU — Last year set records for the growth of genetically engineered crops, as more farmers in Europe and the developing world embraced biotechnology, an industry-supported group reported Wednesday.

Yet anti-biotech activists and other observers still complain that the industry isn't helping alleviate world hunger as it has long promised. None of the commercially available genetically engineered crops last year were nutritionally enhanced. Much of the output is for animal feed.

Some 8.5 million farmers in 21 countries grew engineered crops on 222 million acres last year, an 11 percent increase over 2004, according to a report released by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications.

Nearly 8 million of those people were considered subsistence farmers, the report concluded.

The report was paid for by two philanthropic groups, the Rockefeller Foundation and Italy's Fondazione Bussolera Branca.

In 1996, the first year genetically modified crops were commercially available, about 4.3 million acres were under biotechnology cultivation. Now genetically engineered crops are grown throughout the Americas, China and India. Last year the technology began to be used in Iran.

"The technology has been very important for us," said Jose Manuel Pomar, who joined a conference call announcing the report and said his 250 acres of corn in Spain were saved from a deadly pest because of biotechnology.

Many papaya farmers in Hawaii, which supplies 90 percent of the United States' supply, credit biotechnology with saving the industry from a ruinous virus 10 years ago.

However, opponents note that no new or innovative genetically engineered crops have been introduced in the last decade. Much of the worldwide growth last year was attributed to soybeans genetically engineered to resist weed killer and corn spliced with bacteria genes to resist bugs, traits that directly benefit farmers, not consumers.

So far, no one has introduced crops with added nutrients and other attributes that could fight hunger in the developing world, as the biotech industry often promises. What's more, few biotech versions of crops such as rice that are widely consumed in poor countries have been distributed on a large scale. The four most popular biotech crops are soy, corn, cotton and canola.