Plants and animals have been grown and bred by humans for several thousand years. Over time, those plants and animals with the most desirable characteristics were chosen for breeding the next generations of food and feed. This was, for example, the case for plants with an increased resistance to environmental pressures such as diseases or with an increased yield.
These desirable characteristics appear through naturally occurring variations in the genetic make-up of plants and animals and can be introduced through conventional breeding techniques or by using techniques of modern biotechnologies.
Biotechnology allows to modify the genetic material of organisms (plants, animals, micro-organisms) to give them a new property (e.g. a resistance to diseases and pests, tolerance to challenging climate conditions, improved food quality or nutritional value,removal of pollutants from the environment).
Organisms in which the genetic material has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination are called "genetically modified organisms" (GMOs). Food and feed which contain or consist of such GMOs, or are produced from GMOs, are called "genetically modified (GM) food or feed".
In the last twenty years, new developments in biotechnology have led to a variety of new techniques encompassed in the term "new genomic techniques" (NGTs).