Greenpeace Southeast Asia releases a report titled ’Twenty years of failure - Why GM crops have failed to deliver on their promises’, highlighting evidences of GM environmental risks, market failures, and increased pesticide use.

Widespread protests against a controversial bill regulating genetically modified organisms (GMOs) at the end of 2015 forced the Thai Government to step back and keep intact the ban on GMO field trials. The growing opposition to GM crops in Thailand is backed by a new Greenpeace report reviewing evidence of GM environmental risks, market failures, and increased pesticide use.

“The promises may be growing, but the popularity of GM crops is not. Despite twenty years of pro-GM marketing by powerful industry lobbies, GM technology has only been taken up by a handful of countries, for a handful of crops. GM crops grown on only 3% of global agricultural land. Figures from the GM industry, in fact, show that only five countries account for 90% of global GM cropland, and nearly 100% of these GM crops are one of two kinds: herbicide-tolerant or pesticide-producing." Said Greenpeace Southeast Asia’s Food and Ecological Agriculture Campaigner, Watcharapol Deangsubha.