Food and Feed Biotechnology

Modern biotechnology can play an important role in meeting our future food demands in a sustainable manner. Biotech can increase crop yields, help develop new crops, and adapt existing crops to be cultivated on marginal lands with reduced fresh-water inputs. The technology may not only improve the nutritional quality of staple foods, but can also diminish the need to cultivate crops on deforested land. Rapid advances in biotechnology are reducing the time and cost to develop improved food and feed strains and to engineer crops with improved drought and salinity tolerance and improved nutritional quality. New biotechnology tools enable scientists to introduce biochemical pathways to cells so we can breed plants that are safe and cost-effective sources of these nutrients.