CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY—Participants coming from the private and public media entities were appraised of the developments on agricultural biotechnology in the country in a multisectoral forum here on Wednesday.
The forum, with the theme “Share the Bounty of the Agri-biotechnology Through Mutual Co-existence and the Responsible Stewardship,” focused on the updates, opportunities, issues and concerns of the technology, among others, was organized by Asian Farmers Regional Network (Asfarnet)-Philippines.
Asfarnet, which is pushing for responsible farming and policies toward improving the quality of farmers’ lives and the environment, underscored the importance of biotechnology in addressing the discrepancy between the increasing population and the ability of countries to produce food in spite of the dwindling arable land.
Reynaldo Cabanao, president of Asfarnet-Philippines, said the forum hopes to share the information on biotechnology to the participants so that more people would come to know the advances and benefits of agri-biotechnology for the country’s food supply.
Asfarnet was conceived by farmers from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, who participated in capacity-building workshop on “Farmer to Farmer: Sharing Experiences Related to Biotechnology” that was held in Manila and Cagayan de Oro City in 2003.
The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Application (ISAAA) said biotech crops, the fastest-adopted crop technology in the world, are being adopted by farmers who have concluded that the returns from their planting are high and that repeat planting is the next best thing to do.
Dr. Rhodora Aldemita, ISAAA senior program officer, said the development in agri-biotechnology in the world has confirmed the significant and multiple benefits that biotech crops have generated over the past 20 years. She said the meta-analysis, which was conducted by Klumper and Qaim, concluded that, on the average, genetic modification technology adopted has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37 percent, increased crop yields by 22 percent and increased farmer profits by 68 percent.
“With biotechnology our agriculture would use less and less chemicals to fight insect infestation, chemicals that are harmful to humans,” Aldemita said.
The ISAAA said the United Nations Population Council predicts that by 2050 the global population would be 9 billion people and feeding them would be a daunting challenge facing mankind during the remaining years of this century.
“The fact that the majority of the world’s population is not even aware of the magnitude of the challenge makes the task even more difficult,” the ISAAA said. Aldemita said the Philippines’s more than 100 million population is expected to reach 157 million people by 2050, making the country as the 10th most populous with only 5.4 million hectares of arable land and arable land per capita is only at 0.06.
“So without agri-biotechnology the country’s food production would be jeopardized, thus, we will rely solely on importation for our food requirements. But this scenario can be mitigated with the use of biotech to increase yields in our remaining arable lands, thus ensuring food supply,” Aldemita said.
The ISAAA said provisional data for 1996 to 2013 showed that biotech crops contributed to food security, sustainability and climate change by increasing crop production; provided a better environment by lesser use of pesticides; reduced carbon-dioxide emissions by 28 billion kilograms in 2013 alone—equivalent to taking more than 12 million cars off the road in a year.
It also helped conserve biodiversity in the period by saving 132 million hectares of land; and helped alleviate poverty by helping 16.5 million small farmers and their families totaling not less than 65 million people, who are some of the poorest in the world.
Biotech crops can contribute to a “sustainable-intensification” strategy favored by many science academies worldwide, which allows productivity to be increased only on the current 1.5 billion hectares of global crop land, thereby saving forests and biodiversity, the ISAAA said.