30-Year Study Credits GM Crops With Billions in Farm Income, Lower Emissions
28 September 2026, Manila, Philippines: A newly released global assessment of three decades of genetically modified crop adoption estimates that GM crops generated nearly 385 billion dollars in cumulative farm income between 1996 and 2024, with more than half of that benefit flowing to farmers in developing countries, while also contributing to meaningful reductions in the sector’s greenhouse gas footprint. The report, titled Global Socio-Economic and Environmental Impacts 1996-2024, was authored by Graham Brookes, Director of the UK-based consultancy PG Economics, and formally presented via webinar on September 17 in an event organized jointly by ISAAA, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, and CropLife Asia, with continued trade press coverage of its findings through the following week.
According to the report’s headline figures, GM crop adoption is estimated to have helped avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking between 97 million and 256 million cars off the road for a year, largely through two mechanisms: reduced tractor fuel use associated with herbicide-tolerant crops that require fewer spray passes and support no-till farming practices, and lower overall pesticide active ingredient use, which the report puts at a 6.5 percent reduction attributable to GM adoption. Separately, the report estimates that GM crop cultivation helped conserve about 25.5 million hectares of land in 2024 alone, based on the argument that higher yields on existing biotech-planted acreage reduced the need to bring additional land under cultivation to meet the same production levels. The webinar presentation featured input from Dr Rhodora Romero-Aldemita, ISAAA’s Executive Director, and Dr Stuart Smyth of the University of Saskatchewan, both of whom have published previous research on biotech crop economics and policy.
Reading the numbers in context
It is worth being clear about where this report comes from. PG Economics has produced similar global assessments of GM crop impacts at regular intervals for close to two decades, and its work in this area has consistently been funded or commissioned by industry-linked organizations, including in this instance ISAAA and CropLife Asia, both of which represent or are closely tied to the interests of biotechnology and crop protection companies that develop and sell GM seed traits. That does not make the underlying figures inaccurate, and Brookes’ methodology, which combines farm-level survey data, national agricultural statistics, and modeling of counterfactual scenarios without GM adoption, has been broadly consistent across his reports over the years and is frequently cited in academic and policy literature on biotech crops. But readers should understand it as an industry-adjacent assessment rather than an independent government or multilateral study, a distinction environmental and food-safety advocacy groups have raised in response to previous PG Economics reports, arguing that industry-funded research tends to systematically favor conclusions that support continued and expanded GM crop adoption. No countervailing academic study with directly comparable global scope was identified alongside this report’s release, meaning its specific dollar and emissions figures should be treated as one credible but interested estimate rather than as an independently verified consensus figure.
Why the developing-country income split matters
The claim that more than half of the cumulative 385 billion dollars in farm income benefit reached developing countries is one of the report’s more significant framing points, since it counters a common criticism that GM crop technology primarily benefits large-scale commercial farmers in wealthy countries. If accurate, it would suggest that smallholder farmers growing GM cotton, maize, or soybean varieties in countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America have captured a substantial share of the economic upside from adopting biotech traits, typically through some combination of higher yields, reduced crop losses to pests, and lower spending on insecticide sprays. India in particular has one of the world’s largest GM cotton growing areas, and Indian farm income effects from Bt cotton adoption have been the subject of extensive, sometimes contested, academic research over the past two decades, making the developing-country income claim one that Indian policymakers, seed companies, and farm groups will likely want to examine against India-specific data before drawing firm conclusions.
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