There is little doubt that genetic manipulation will open more new doors in this field, and will dramatically alter farming worldwide. It does not require a crystal ball to imagine the potential of the immediate biotechnological future. From the advances in recent years, it is possible to extrapolate to a number of likely developments based on research now in progress. The Flavr Savr tomato was reviewed by the FDA in the spring of 1994 and found to be as safe as conventionally produced tomatoes. This is the first time the FDA has evaluated a whole food produced by biotechnology.
Exciting prospects are likely to result from industrial-scale plant tissue culture.
This may soon obviate the need for rearing whole plants in order to generate valuable commodities such as dyes, flavorings, drugs, and chemicals. Cloning techniques could prove to be the way to tackle some of the acute problems of reforesting in semi-desert areas. Seedlings grown from the cells of mature trees could greatly speed up the process. In the summer of 1987, a Belgian team introduced into crop plants a group of genes encoding for insect resistance and resistance to widely used herbicides. This combination of advantageous genes could bring about a new era in plant protection.