Bt cotton was first introduced in the US on 730,000 hectares in 1996 (James and Krattiger 1996) with additional small hectarage in Mexico and Australia for a global total of approximately 0.8 million hectares (Table 16). China adopted Bt cotton in 1997 and the stacked genes of Bt and herbicide tolerance were introduced in the US in 1997 (James 1997); by 2001 the stacked gene product accounted for 55 % of all the global commercial cotton containing the Bt gene, compared with 45% of the single Bt gene. By 1998 the hectarage of Bt cotton had doubled to 1.5 million hectares and it was grown in a total of six countries, USA, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, China and South Africa. Between 1996 and 2001, when Indonesia grew Bt cotton for the first time a total of 13 million hectares (Table 16) was grown by seven countries (James 2001, 2000a, 2000b).

Figure 1 shows the global adoption of Bt cotton since its introduction in 1996. In six years Bt cotton has increased more than five fold from 0.8 million hectare in 1996, to 2.1 million hectares in 1999, to 4.3 million hectares in 2001. Assuming a global average of 34 million hectares of cotton the % global adoption with Bt cotton has increased from 2% in 1996 to 13% in 2001.

Notably in 2002, India, the largest cotton-growing country in the world, which accounts for 25 % (8.7 million hectares) of global hectarage, grew 44,500 hectares of Bt cotton for the first time. In 2002, Colombia in South America also approved 2,000 hectares of pre-commercial plantings of Bt cotton. Thus, in 2002 there are nine countries commercializing Bt cotton, seven developing countries, three from Asia (China, India and Indonesia), three from Latin America (Mexico Argentina and Colombia) and on the African continent, South Africa. The two industrial countries that are commercializing Bt cotton are the USA and Australia. It is noteworthy that up to 5 million farmers grew Bt cotton in 2001, of which 99% were in developing countries. Approximately 25,000 large farmers benefited from the technology in the industrial countries of the USA and Australia. The vast majority of the 4 to 5 million Bt cotton farmers in the developing countries in the South are resource-poor farmers, mainly in China and also in South Africa, who have derived substantial economic, environmental, health and social benefits (Pray et al 2002, Ismael et al 2002 a,b,c) that have contributed to the alleviation of poverty and a better quality of life.