[Excerpt] Bioengineering provides unique and dramatic opportunities for crop improvement. It can be used to develop crop varieties that would otherwise be unavailable and can facilitate much faster and more precise ways of developing improved varieties. It can help to increase yields and reliability and thus reduce food costs for the consumer while helping to control input costs for farmers through reduced applications of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer. The extent to which this will be achieved depends on how effectively the global scientific community – including both the public and private sectors – can cooperate in harnessing the power of crop bioengineering and the allied scientific fields of genomics and bioinformatics for the poor and hungry of the world. This, in turn depends on the extent to which projects are demand-driven and holistic in approach, integrating all technical and non-technical factors relevant to the product development and commercialization/ delivery chain.
