The adoption of herbicide-resistant crops could help improve water and soil quality by reducing the need for tilling.
Gore went on to decry corporate decisions to develop herbicide-resistant crops and a bacterium that could prevent commercially crippling frost damage to crops.
Mali, where the focus will be on irrigation and disease-resistant crops.
Researchers at Monsanto and elsewhere are working quietly on the next potential breakthrough in agriculture: drought-resistant crops, which are meant to help farmers cope in an increasingly water-scarce world.
However, English Nature, the UK Government's wildlife advisor is using the publication of the report to renew its call for a delay in the commercial planting of insect-resistant crops in Britain.
This approach, which has been repeatedly condemned by the scientific community, has discouraged the development of new pest-resistant crops, encouraged greater use of synthetic chemical pesticides, and limited the use of the newest genetic engineering technology mainly to larger developers who can pay the inflated regulatory costs.
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The question at the heart of the case was how to apply a judicially created doctrine that originated in the 19th century to 21st-century innovations like drought- and insect-resistant crops, which require hundreds millions of dollars to develop but which can be readily copied millions of times because they consist of genetic or other easily replicable material.
As that report predicted when the regulation was proposed more than a decade ago, it discourages the development of new pest-resistant crops and prolongs and increases the use of synthetic chemical pesticides, limits the use of the technology mainly to larger developers who can pay the inflated regulatory costs, and handicaps the U.S. in competition for international markets.
The uptake of more radical innovations, such as drought resistant GM crops, is another solution to increase food production, suggests Agrimonde's report.
There were concerns the development pesticide-resistant GM crops meant consumers were being exposed to increasingly toxic residues, some of which could damage embryos in the womb.
The plan also involves developing crops resistant to environmental stresses, particularly drought and salinity.
Herbicide tolerant crops are made resistant to a proprietary weedkiller, while Bt crops include genes that produce an insect-killing toxin.
Next-generation GM crops could boost food grown, cut pesticide use, make crops more resistant to droughts like the one that crushed the US corn crop last year, even create crops that fertilize themselves from the air.
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When natural evolution causes weeds or pests to resist their poisons, which their crops are resistant to, they simply breed a new crop and create a new poison to kill the pests.
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In the agriculture sector alone, Monsanto and its competitors are spending billions of dollars annually on agricultural biotechnology research, pursuing traits that make crops higher yielding and more resistant to various environmental stresses, and to make grains with increased nutritional value.
Imagine if GM could be used to create crops that produced higher yields, or were resistant to drought or could even fix their own nitrogen and produce their own fertiliser.
According to Benbrook, the negative effects of genetic engineering have resulted from the widespread adoption by farmers of crops such as corn and soybean engineered to be resistant to the herbicide glyphosate.
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Although it is true that drought-resistant seeds will be needed as will low-chill fruit trees and root crops they are not likely to come from genetic engineering.
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