ABSTRACT
The global area planted to transgenic crops jumped by 44 percent between 1998 and 1999, from 27.8 million hectares to 39.9 million. 1 The area has grown 23-fold since 1996, the first year of large-scale commercialization, when just 1.7 million hectares were planted. 2 But 99 percent of the current global transgenic area is found in just three nations—the United States, Argentina, and Canada; 72 percent of the global area is in the United States alone. 3 (See Table 1.)
