Genetic approaches have been utilized extensively for crop improvement, and biotechnology has expanded the tools available to geneticists and breeders. Herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant crop cultivars developed through recombinant DNA technologyhave been rapidly adopted for soybeans, cotton, maize, and canola. Between their first large-scale introduction in 1996 and 2003, the global area planted to transgenic field crops had grown to 67.7 million hectares, representing 55% of the area of soybeans, 21 % of cotton, 16% of canola and 11% of maize (James, 2003), While 63% of this area was in the United States and 6% in Canada, 85% of the 7 million farmers growing transgenic crops were in China and South Africa. Although adoption is still limitedin some countries, noticeably the European Union and Japan, other countries such as India, Brazil and the Philippines have recently approved the production of biotech crops. China, in particular, is supporting research on an array of biotech crops (Huang and Rozelle, 2004).
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机译：遗传方法已广泛用于作物改良，而生物技术已扩展了遗传学家和育种者可用的工具。通过重组DNA技术开发的耐除草剂和抗虫的农作物品种已被大豆，棉花，玉米和油菜迅速采用。在1996年至2003年首次大规模引进之间，转基因大田作物的全球种植面积已增长至6770万公顷，占大豆面积的55％，棉花的21％，油菜的16％和玉米的11％ （James，2003年），虽然该地区的63％在美国和6％在加拿大，但700万种植转基因作物的农民中有85％在中国和南非。尽管在某些国家（尤其是欧盟和日本）的采用仍然受到限制，但印度，巴西和菲律宾等其他国家最近也批准了转基因作物的生产。特别是中国正在支持一系列转基因作物的研究（Huang and Rozelle，2004）。
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