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The United States is the world’s undisputed leader in the development of genetic
engineering and its application in agriculture. U.S. companies have led the modern
biotechnology revolution in science and are spearheading the commercialization of
genetically modified (GM) crops, especially soybean, corn, canola, and cotton. Genetic engineering has been heralded as a technological breakthrough that is set to transform
entire industrial sectors. It has also been credited with pushing agriculture to new levels of productivity, fighting malnutrition and ensuring food security for the future. The United States has expended great efforts, financial and political, to promote biotechnology and its adoption in agriculture worldwide—but with mixed success.
Ever since the first GM food products became available in supermarkets in the mid-1990s, consumer resistance and environmental protests have greeted the arrival of the new technology. While biotechnology has aroused only limited suspicion in North America, many supermarkets and food producers in Europe and elsewhere have eliminated most GM content in food products, and the experimental planting of GM crops has run into local opposition by farmers and campaigners in countries from India to Mexico. A growing number of countries have imposed strict import rules for GM seeds and crops, with some maintaining a complete ban on all such imports, even in the form of food aid. And in 2003, an international treaty on the safety of trade in genetically modified organisms (GMOs) entered into force, despite U.S. resistance. The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety—negotiated in the late 1990s under the auspices of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)—has now become the cornerstone of an emerging international biosafety regime that legitimizes precautionary trade restrictions on GM seeds and commodities.
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