ABSTRACT
Agriculture has served as a source of food and ber and for other uses from ancient times. In addition to food, plants provide a broad array of products that serve nonfood uses. Plants are renewable resources from which numerous bio-based products can be derived. The ability to genetically engineer plants allows several different types of alteration to be introduced. These traits can expand the uses for plant-derived products. One broad type of change includes effects on agronomic performance. Such changes have already been commercialized and include herbicide and insect resistance. Among the rst genetically engineered commodity crops were corn, soybean, and cotton. These were introduced in 1996 and were minor crops, with cotton at 13% of the crop, soybean 2%, and corn less than 1%. In 2008 in the United States, 80% of the corn crop, 92% of the soybean crop, and 86% of the cotton crop planted were genetically engineered with one or more traits (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data/ biotechcrops). While initially there was limited acceptance by growers internationally, in the United States the advantages of reduced investment in chemical controls and improved yields led to rapid acceptance of the technology by growers. Since the introduction of these crops, they had been approved for planting in 23 countries [1], from two major (China, United States) and four minor genetically modied (GM) crop-producing countries in 1996 (Canada, Argentina, Australia, and Mexico), when virus-resistant tobacco was the major GM crop [2].
