ABSTRACT
In the 13 years that followed the commercial introduction of genetically engineered ‰eld crops in 1996, agricultural biotechnology became the most quickly adopted crop technology in history. More than 14 million farmers in 25 different countries planted a combined 134 million hectares of genetically modi‰ed (GM) crops in 2009.1 Virtually, none of this land, however, was planted to horticultural crops, even though agricultural biotechnology was born with the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994. While the introduction of agricultural biotechnology in major ‰eld crops has been a success and marked by a tremendous acceptance by farmers and a strong empirical record of productivity growth, the development of horticultural biotechnology has been slow. The Flavr Savr tomato, intended to resist damage in shipping, is no longer produced, nor is a strawberry engineered to resist frost damage or an insect-resistant potato. Only the GM papaya has achieved any degree of commercial success, with 70% of the U.S.-bound Hawaiian crop planted with GM seeds. No GM horticultural crop has been deregulated since 1999, and the number of ‰eld trials has declined in recent years.2
