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The agri-business sector, reacting to a recent approval of multiple biotech crops by the Technical Advisory and National Biosafety committees, has claimed that new technologies will ensure Pakistani farmers an increase in domestic agriculture productivity. . . .
It also claimed the government gave the go-ahead in accordance with the national bio-safety laws and the international standard operating procedures. . . .
It also said the sub-committee for GM corn commercialisation had thoroughly reviewed all the field trial reports, safety studies, product profiling, molecular characterisation, allergenicity studies, and digestibility studies etc to assess the risk and concluded that GM corn is as safe as its conventional counterpart.
The National Biosafety Committee approved the laboratory manipulation, field trials and commercialisation of different crops like wheat, rice, maize, cotton, tobacco, groundnut and sugarcane. The technologies advanced include insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, drought tolerance, salinity tolerance etc.
The pending applications which were approved were from several public institutes and private companies. . . .
Croplife pointed out that large scale trials in open field under confined conditions are already completed however, open field trials without any confinement on farmers’ field can only be conducted once the technologies are deregulated. . . .
. . . .With these approvals Pakistan has joined the club which has granted regulatory approvals for agriculture biotechnologies since 1996. Globally, 82 percent of Soybean, 68 percent of cotton, 30 percent of maize and 25 percent of canola is converted to Biotech. Because of Biotech crops increased crop production is valued at $133 billion with a saving of approximately 500 million active ingredients of pesticides.
Read full, original post: New technologies can increase agriculture productivity
