It's human nature to constantly try to improve our quality of life and the environment. In agriculture, humans have been selecting, sowing, and harvesting seeds for centuries to produce food products that will sustain them. As farmers started to understand more about agriculture, they selected the plants that were stronger or offered the highest yield or best flavour. Although they didn't understand the principles involved, they were in fact practising the earliest form of biotechnology. Scientists and breeders now better understand how these biological processes work and are able to copy and in some cases improve on, traditional breeding methods.

Biotechnology can be seen as an evolution of traditional agricultural methods. In the past, farmers used plant breeding and cross-breeding to develop certain characteristics in their crops such as higher yields or better resistance to pests. This technique involved the transfer of many thousands of genes and many years of cross-breeding before a plant with the desired features was identified. Biotechnology has made possible the selective breeding and hybridisation of crops. This process allows for the transfer of only one or a few desirable genes, permitting scientists to develop crops with specific beneficial traits and crops without undesirable traits.

As global food demand increases, biotechnology offers farmers the potential to produce foods that are more nutritious and better tasting, produce higher crop yields or crops that are naturally protected from disease and insects.

Benefits can also be seen in the environment, where insect-protected biotechnology plants reduce the need for pesticide use. These crops also allow for less potential exposure of farmers and groundwater to chemical residues, while providing farmers with season-long control. By reducing the need for pest control, the amount of time, effort and resources spent on the land are also reduced, which in turn helps to preserve the topsoil.

Agricultural biotechnology can be likened to the process that bakers, brewers, vintners and ranchers have been using for centuries. They have been using biology to their advantage and modifying genes to make bread, beer, wine, and cheese.

For example, before genetic engineering, most of the enzyme rennet, used to make cheese, came from the lining of calves' stomachs. Biotechnology has enabled researchers to remove the specific gene that produces rennet and reproduce it in bacteria. This allows the production of rennet through a fermentation process, eliminating the need for extracts from calves' stomachs. Currently, nearly 50 per cent of the rennet needed in cheese production is produced through this fermentation process.

Yeast used in bread making has also been improved through biotechnology, resulting in a yeast that speeds up the leavening process in breads and pastries. Researchers in the United Kingdom developed this yeast by simply rearranging and duplicating certain yeast genes. Ancient bread makers might have been able to accomplish the same feat, but not without years of experimentation.

Biotechnology has been used in a number of crops for several years, and more genetically improved products are expected to be on the market in coming years, many of which are similar in nature to products already in the market.

Benefits that can be expected from biotechnology in the near future include:

• reduced levels of natural toxins in plants;
• simpler and faster methods to locate pathogens, toxins and contaminants;
• extended time before spoilage