While the world was still hotly debating genetic engineering in crops and animals, Vietnam considered this evolving field indispensable for social and economic progress, experts said.

Comparing application of genetic engineering to traveling by plane, Doctor Le Tran Binh, director of the Biotechnology Institute, said that though people knew that accidents may occur, they had little choice if they didn’t want to be left behind.

"You have no option but travel by plane, if you do not want to be left far behind," Binh said.

Though opinions are varied, many scientists have already started supporting genetic engineering.

Giving his nod for genetic engineering in crops such as cotton and forestry produce, Professor Vu Tuyen Hoang called for more careful consideration before applying genetic engineering on food crops such as rice, maize, coffee and soybeans.

Though hybridization and genetic engineering can both help increase crop productivity, the former was safer, Hoang said, pointing to Vietnam’s hybrid rice and maize that had the highest productivity in Asia.

Genetically modified crops usually produced certain toxins to protect themselves from harmful pests, though the effect of such toxins on humans remained uncertain, Hoang said.

Vietnam had issued a decree on biotechnology in 1994, and an instruction on conducting biotechnology research and application, including genetic engineering, a year later.

Professor Le Doan Dien, general secretary of the Vietnam Foodstuff Science and Technology Association, said genetically engineered products had increased productivity and output of different kinds of crops.

Thanks to genetic engineering, China had become the world’s leading exporter of cotton. It was widely held that modified seeds would ensure food security in the future when productivity of foodstuff decreased due to deforestation, land erosion, soil exhaustion, weather changes, and lack of cultivable land, he said.

One third of the population in the world has accepted the application of genetic engineering, with China, India and the U.S., countries with large populations, publicly promoting modified crops.

According to forecasts, by 2020, nearly 100 percent of maize, barley, cotton, and soybean areas in the world would use genetic engineering for production.