(The Dominion Post ) - Genetically engineered crops have increased 60-fold since 1996 and now cover more than 100 million hectares in 22 countries. Most grow in the United States, but plenty grows in Argentina, Brazil, Canada and Australia. Last year the acreage trebled in India and South Africa. The bulk of these crops are cotton, soybeans maize, canola, alfalfa and papayas.

In 2005-2006 the number of farmers planting GE crops grew from 8.5 million to 10.3 million. Of these 10.3 million, more than nine million were small, poor farmers from China, India and the Philippines. Their GE crops were worth $5 billion to them.

Apart from increasing yields, GE crops have reduced the use of pesticides by 224,000 tonnes a year and they have helped reduce carbon dioxide emissions in a big way.

GE farming reduces CO2 emissions by cutting back on the fossil fuels used to spray insecticides and herbicides and by "conservation tillage". The seeds of many GE crops don't require the soil to be ploughed or tilled. They are simply drilled into unploughed fields. In 2005, the carbon so locked in the soil amounted to 8 million tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of removing 3.6 million cars off the road.

GE techniques show great promise in developing future ethanol and biodiesel crops. These high-yielding crops will substitute for fossil fuels, help recycle and sequester carbon in the soil and significantly help slow climate warming.

But these changes are only the start.

Among the many other GE plants and animals grown on farms or released into the wild since 1987 have been salmon, catfish, mites, nematode worms, Mediterranean fruit fly, spruce budworm, pomace fly, pink bollworm, soybean looper moth, aspen, cedar, Douglas fir and eucalypt trees, carnations, tomatoes, sorghum, chicory, barley, broccoli, cauliflower, sunflowers, tobacco, canola and insect fungi, yeast, the microbes Pseudomonas, Rhizobium, Bacillus, several insect viruses, protein-and vitamin-enhanced potatoes and rice.

The Chinese are planting forests of drought-resistant GE poplars. Virtually all American flavourings are genetically engineered these days. Vanilla, cherry, plum, monosodium glutamate, clove, strawberry and citric acid are produced by genetically engineered bacteria, as are aromas such as leather, pine, bacon and musk, to say nothing of genetically engineered insulin and several vaccines. Crops high in omega-3 oil, tearless onions, decaffeinated coffee, and traits more useful to farmers in poorer countries are on the way. Genetically sterilised women walk the streets of America. The list goes on and on.

Now, though hundreds of millions of people and endless cattle and pigs have eaten this stuff for more than a decade, no harm has come to any of them. No superweeds have appeared, biodiversity and natural ecosystems remain unaffected, and research shows that the GE crops can happily co-exist with normal crops.