GM food technology abroad and its implications for Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

The potential economic benefits from agricultural biotechnology adoption by ANZ need to be weighed against any likely loss of market access abroad for crops that may contain genetically modified (GM) organisms. This paper uses the global GTAP model to estimate effects of other countries' GM policies without and with ANZ farmers adopting GM varieties of various grains and oilseeds. The benefits to ANZ from adopting GM crops under a variety of scenarios are positive even in the presence of the ban on imports from GM-adopting countries by the EU (but not if East Asia also applied such a ban).Biotechnology, GMOs, regulation, trade policy, computable general equilibrium, Crop Production/Industries, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, C68, D58, F13, O3, Q17, Q18,