With the United Nations projecting a global population of about 10 billion by 2050, estimates indicate that farmers will need to grow twice as much food as they do today. The impact is particularly significant for countries with the largest population growth and the most widespread nutritional deficiencies. Many agricultural tools and resources will be needed to meet these demands. Given the limits on land available for cultivation and the ability of current techniques to grow food in arid and pest-infested areas and salty water, agriculture biotechnology now offers one of the most promising approaches.

Biotechnology's potential role in addressing vitamin A deficiency is one example. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 140million to 250 million children, most living in developing nations, suffer serious symptoms of vitamin A deficiency, the leading cause of avoidable blindness and other afflictions. Vitamin-enhanced "golden rice" and cooking oils derived through biotechnology may help to meet this challenge. Similar approaches are targeting dietary shortages of iron, zinc, and other essential nutrients.

The first biotech food reached the market in 1994: a tomato with improved ripening. Insect-protected maize was introduced in 1996, followed by pest-resistant and herbicide-tolerant maize, cotton, and soya. While the first countries to adopt the technology were developed countries including the United States, Canada, and Argentina, biotech crops are now grown in 22 countries around the world by more than 10.3 million farmers, of which 9.3 million are small-scale farmers living in developing countries. Maize, cotton, and soya constitute the largest share of crops currently produced using biotechnology; however, other biotech-improved crops are now available, including disease-resistant papaya and squash and nutritionally improved maize, soya, and canola. Growing biotech crops increased income to farmers by about $27 billion between 1996 and 2005, with $13 billion of that going to farmers in developing countries.

Yet all these advances have generated differences of opinion and even controversy. Although data show that most American consumers feel they do not know enough about food biotechnology to have an opinion, among those who do express an opinion, positive attitudes are twice as common as are concerns. In a 2006 survey by the International Food Information Council, some 75 percent of American consumers indicated that they are at least somewhat confident in the safety of their food. By contrast, consumer perceptions in Europe have historically been more negative, likely stemming from a number of food safety crises totally unrelated to food biotechnology. Nevertheless, consumer acceptance appears to be slowly growing in Europe; consumers polled in 2005 by Eurobarometer expressed an increasingly positive opinion toward medical and pharmaceutical developments in biotechnology and a moderately positive opinion about the technology as a whole.

As with many major developments in science, initial doubts and uncertainties may change to acceptance and optimism as knowledge and understanding increase. Agricultural biotechnology is meeting with growing acceptance in countries around the world, helping farmers and food producers rise to the challenge of producing enough food to meet the needs of growing populations in the 21st century and beyond.

-- Rachel Cheatham, director of science and health communications, and Andrew Benson, vice president for international relations, International Food Information Council

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.