One Billionth Biotechnology Acre and Counting
The one billionth acre using genetically enhanced crops has been
planted this spring. Dean Kleckner, former president of American
Farm Bureau and now chairman of a not for profit group Truth About
Trade and Technology is a national and international leader in
agriculture. Kleckner and the Truth About Trade and Technology
organization have developed a sophisticated monitoring system for
counting the acres and the one billionth acre is expected to be
planted this spring.

May 11, 2005 -- Remember how McDonald's used to boast beneath the
golden arches about how many billions of hamburgers it had sold?

Well, it's time for someone to raise a sign on behalf of
agricultural biotechnology, because somewhere in the world this week
a farmer planted the 1 billionth acre of genetically enhanced crops.

This is a huge milestone for the world. Just ten years ago, biotech
crops became commercially available for the first time. Since then,
they've been adopted with astonishing speed. In the United States,
about 85 percent of all soybeans, 75 percent of all cotton and
nearly half of all corn is biotech enhanced.

Just how big is a billion acres? Let's start by recalling that the
traditional understanding of a single acre is the amount of land a
yoke of oxen can plow in a day. In German, the word "Acker" means,
literally, "a field."

Today, of course, we need more precise measurements--and so a square
acre measures precisely 208.75 feet per side.

A billion acres is a lot of territory. It would take more than 27
land masses the size of Iowa to fill up that much space.

If you lined up a billion square acres, they would circle the planet
at the equator more than 1587 times. They would reach to the moon
and back 164 times. They would go all the way to the sun and all the
way back--and still have some length left to spare.

Some years ago, it was possible to say that biotech crops were a
newfangled concept. Today, with a billion acres of them now planted,
they are a conventional source of food.

There are those who will continue to hurl insults by calling
them "Frankenfood" and the like, but these shrill voices are
increasingly out of step with mainstream methods of food production.
How many more acres must we plant, harvest, and consume before these
radical naysayers admit that biotech enhanced crops are a proven
technology? Must we go all the way to the sun and back before
they'll see the light?

The simple fact is this - biotech crops are the latest developments
in an ancient line of agricultural innovation. Farmers are the
world's original genetic enhancers--they've been crossbreeding
plants for thousands of years. In the wild, there's never been any
such thing as a juicy tomato. But there have been little red berries
that farmers, across generations, have turned into a staple crop.

Something similar could be said of virtually everything we eat, and
biotech crops are a part of this heritage. Farmers have chosen to
adopt them so rapidly because they produce more food at lower costs.
On a planet populated by over 6 billion people--and the number is
growing every day--this is an essential characteristic.

Farmers have also rapidly adopted biotech because we care about the
environment. Biotech crops help the environment in a variety of
ways. Yielding more food on existing farmland reduces the pressure
to cut down rainforests in Brazil and elsewhere. Since 1980, farmers
around the world have increased our corn production by 45 percent
but it was accomplished by adding less than 5 percent more acres to
our fields. That additional corn was produced on the equivalent of
130 million acres of rainforest that has not been cut down!

Moreover, biotech crops protect our environment by allowing us to
use farming techniques that save topsoil and use our resources much
more effectively.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, biotech crops are approved
for commercial use only after regulators at the Department of
Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental
Protection Agency have tested them repeatedly and registered their
approval.

The bottom line is that they're perfectly safe to eat. There's never
been a case anywhere of a biotech plant causing a human being so
much as to sneeze.

In the future, it will become increasingly clear that biotech crops
aren't merely acceptable to eat--they'll be preferable to eat, as
plant breeder's research ways to produce crops that add essential
vitamins and nutrients to our diets. The research is going on right
now and it promises to transform the ways in which we think about
keeping ourselves healthy.

So today, we celebrate a billion acres. At some point in the future,
like McDonald's, so many billions will have been "served" that we'll
quit counting these biotech acres altogether.

Dean Kleckner is chairman of Truth About Trade and Technology, an
Iowa farmer and a past president of the American Farm Bureau. Truth
About Trade and Technology is a national grassroots advocacy group
based in Des Moines, IA, formed and led by farmers in support of
freer trade and advancements in biotechnology. Phone: 515.274.0800

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