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Purpose – To identify how agricultural biotechnology addresses the two challenges facing agriculture: to feed a world growing to 9 billion people by 2050 and to provide a liquid fuel alternative to petroleum.

Design –This chapter relies on econometric modeling, a review of existing literature, and diagrammatic modeling to articulate the impact of agricultural biotechnology on food and energy markets.

Findings –Agricultural biotechnology reduces the tension between food security and biofuel production. It reduces volatility in food and fuel markets and can mitigate risk to biofuel processors.

Originality – The analysis is original although it relies on previous research to some extent. The analysis is compared to and contrasted with related work.

We introduce a risk management framework to assess food security, which is interpreted as the probability of fatality or adverse health effects due to lack of food and which is a product of food availability, access, and vulnerability.

We derive cost-minimizing policies to achieve food security objectives by addressing availability, access, and vulnerability, and taking into account how randomness, uncertainty, and heterogeneity affect the system.

Ignoring key sources of variability, particularly heterogeneity, may lead to biases because food security policies require targeting the most vulnerable populations, which may each have unique features such as age, location, and health status. Establishing any policy solution requires making tough choices about policy criteria. Outcomes will differ when the criteria is to minimize overall risk or to minimize risk to the most vulnerable.

Policies addressing food security crises should balance enhanced supply with targeting available food and the provision of emergency health services to vulnerable populations.

This paper uses survey data collected from tomato growers in California to determine the factors that influence pest control advisor participation and pesticide use recommendations. We find that advisor recommendations are dependent on the probability of infestation conditional on the calendar and on advisors' perceptions of growers' knowledge, while growers depend more on information obtained from observing their crop. We also determine that the pesticide use recommendations of advisors are, on average, higher than those of growers. Results demonstrate the incentives of grower and advisor pesticide use decisions that must be taken into consideration when regulatory policy is designed.