It would not be possible for the world, especially countries like India that have limited resources and huge populations, to maintain food production without genetically modified (GM) crops technology, industry experts hinted.

Ravi Khetrapal, regional director at Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International (CABI), said that a judicious use of plant biotechnology could enable farmers to grow more food on the same amount of land.

He said that it was the use of higher yielding biotech crops that allowed the world to maintain food production between 1996 and 2010.

Speaking on the topic, he said, “In the absence of higher yielding biotech crops, an additional 91 million hectares of farmland would have been required between 1996 and 2010 to maintain the global food production.”

He added that plant biotechnology helped farmers produce more food on the same amount of land as technology provided crops with resistance to diseases and pests and enhance their ability to give more yields.

In the past sixteen years, a cumulative three billion acres of land was used to produce biotech crops in around 30 countries across the globe.

Experts see plant biotechnology as imperative because the world population will reach more than nine billion by the year of 2050.