The Great GMO Debate
We believe that GMOs can help us benefit economically, and socially in many ways. They can help resolve world hunger or help create healthier crops with more nutrients. Many argue that they are harmful to the environment but they are not, research shows that GM foods are perfectly safe, can result in using less chemicals and help the world. Genetically modified foods are perfectly safe to eat. The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine have conducted lots of experiments testing if these foods are safe and healthy to eat. They have found that GM foods are not any less safe than foods that are not genetically modified.The scientists wrote that they, “‘found no substantiated evidence that foods from GE
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Fewer chemicals are used because the plants are altered to be resistant to the harsh conditions that pesticides protect them from. The use of fossil fuels has decreased because less insecticides and herbicides are used on the GM plants, “In Bangladesh conventional farmers sometimes have to spray their brinjal (eggplant) crops twice a week to protect them from the highly damaging fruit and shoot borer—that’s over 180 times a season. IR brinjal may need as little as one application during a season.” Planting GMOs can infect the land of other farmers and as an effect of this, the neighboring farm will gain the benefits that come with the GE plants. The other plants may be resistant to the harsh environments surrounding them. Some people may say that GM foods that are given to 3rd world countries are bad and unhelpful. Some african farmers have actually asked for them to be banned. They say that we should, ‘“recognise that farmers in Africa already have effective approaches to seed and agriculture, which are far more environmentally and farmer-friendly than GM.’” But their crops don’t have special nutrients in them that they need to survive like GM foods do. In GM foods they insert genes like beta carotene from other organisms to make them
Agronomists have been working on these problems for years, but the rapid population growth of humans makes overcoming these challenges increasingly urgent. If we can’t feed the world, it will eventually feed on us.” (Newsweek/United Nations) Scientists find a way to add “medicine” to plant genes, which help it withstands pest attacks and drought problems.“Some GMO corn crops can protect harvests in water-limited conditions better than conventionally produced crops. Other GMOs can also promote use of no-till farming, which keeps more moisture in the soil. No-till also enables farmers to make fewer passes through the field using machinery, which means less fuel used and greenhouse gases emitted.”(Monsanto) GMOs are useful for helping with planting crops in any area of the world.
A major upside to GMOs is fighting world hunger. People also need to realize that the world population is increasing rapidly (Baragona).The only way that we will be able to support the growing population is to produce more food while still using the same amount or less resources. Farmers can do this by through the use of GMO’s. GMO’s have certain traits that non-GMO organisms don't have that can make crops produce more food and resources while using less water and
For a while now, the food that we consume has been generated through a far more complicated process than we had ever thought. Genetically Modified Organisms is the process by which food is being altered and grown in ways that do not occur naturally. Farming practices have been altered from organic to majorly GMO, in order to accommodate this highly profitable industry as well as the high demand by the citizens. GMOs allow food to grow faster, act as a bug repellant, and also cause the product to grow bigger in size in a short time span. We have for the most part stopped relying on local farmers and organic product to know depending on what is most convenient to us. With grocery stores being so readily available with anything you could possibly think of, or ask for, it would be hard to pass this convenience up.
There are a plethora of undeniable benefits that the GMOs have brought forth. First is the fact that they are a solution to world hunger. GMO
GMO Foods help eliminate the need for pesticides and other insect killing products. Lowering the pesticide content in our food will help increase our health. Also, GMOS can help prevent the spoilage of food increasing the amount produced each year.
Most people think that GMOs are just filled with bad, unhealthy chemicals. But what they don't realize is that all the chemicals found in genetically modified plants are actually all-natural. There are many plants in nature that use the same chemicals or compounds as GMOs. For an example, the foxglove plant has a deadly pollen. This defense mechanism works by protecting the planet when something tries to eat it. So you can see that even organic plants have the same abilities to protect themselves. The difference is that in GMOs, scientists have programed the plant to do this, not nature. It’s man’s way of using nature to our benefit (Fetters, 2014”).
GMO foods enhanced a crop protection because a protein is made to kill certain insects when they feed on the plants. This advancement increases crop protection so more crops will live. There has also been improvements to the food process as well as the stock the markets. the more products grown the lower the value because the super markets will began to become to get overwhelmed with food item.
Each new generation has become increasingly wary of the products they consume due to the escalating concerns about personal health and longevity. As a result of this trend, the consumption of organic produce has been inflating in the recent years. Consumers assume that anything labeled with “organic” on it is deemed to be superior as they are plagued with the belief that organic goods possess numerous benefits to one’s health and the environment. As these reasons are spread around between consumers, genetically modified organisms (also known as GMOs) have grown a bad reputation amongst health advocates as being inferior to organic produce. However, people fail to see that there are no significant differences between GMOs and organic produce that justify making the latter a preferred choice in the market. In fact, scientific evidence even suggests that GMOs can be considered better than organic produce as they are found to be preferable for varying reasons, such as being more beneficial to the environment and being higher quality. Therefore, consumers need to suspend their suspicions of genetically modified produce being a subpar product that supposedly results in detrimental effects, compared to organically
In conclusion, Gmo products today are used worldwide by farmers and companies. Live stocks are fed with gmo crops to make them more nutritious and are prepared with gmo. Gmo products are beneficial because they are safe to eat, resist viruses and are
The GM crops mostly the insect resistant and herbicide tolerance crops have contributed to reductions in greenhouse gas emission. Greenhouse gas is actually a gaseous compound in the atmosphere, which absorbs the infrared radiations and holds the heat in atmosphere. Further, leads to increase of heat in the atmosphere, this ultimately leads to global warming. In GM technology the farmers have to make few passes on their fields to spray insecticides and herbicides, which means they require less fuel to spray on this GM crops. In conventional farming the farmer has to spray their crops twice a week to protect them from highly damaging fruit, but where as in insect resistant crop (GM technology) need only as little as one time spray during a season. GM crops have helped most of the farmers to
Of course, when there is an argument against something, there will be a counter argument that will be for the same topic. One of the biggest health benefits that a GMO can bring to the world is the additional nutrients that can be added to the GMO (Murnaghan, 2017). This can be extremely helpful in poverty stricken areas. A food that is very common in that area can be enhanced to include the nutrient that is lacking. This will allow for the people in the area to have an all-around healthier diet without having to buy even more food to consume all the right nutrients. With the addition of nutrient enhancement in GMOs, the battle of malnutrition will also be helped (Duvauchelle, 2014). Malnutrition is very common in third world countries (Nodoushani,
First of all, we use less pesticides on GMO crops than in regular crops. For example, according to the “Living History Farm” website it states, “When genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were introduced to farmers' fields in 1996, one of the major selling points was that these new crop varieties would reduce the use of pesticides.” This means that even since 1996, when GMO were introduced into the farmers fields, the farmers got to use less pesticides on their crops.
A main reason that many people believe is the reason why GMOs exists is because they increase the yield. However, according to the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report which is authored by more than 400 scientists yields actually declined. Also, “ They determined that the current GMOs have nothing to offer the goals of reducing hunger and poverty, improving nutrition, health and rural livelihoods, and facilitating social and environmental sustainability. On the contrary, GMOs divert money and resources that would otherwise be spent on more safe, reliable, and appropriate technologies.” These facts are what scare me. People believe that GMOs are making life easier because they allow for a higher yield and therefore feeding more people however this is not
Humans have been intentionally changing the genetic properties of animals and plants for centuries, through all the standard breeding techniques of the use of radiation and chemicals to create random mutations, some of them turn out to be useful, for example Genetic Modified (GM) Foods. What is Genetically Modified (GM) Foods? GM foods are foods that are derived from organisms that have been genetically engineered. Also they are called genetically engineered (GE) or transgenic crop that are generally made of a genetic marker. GMO have a very long history. In fact, they have been around for thousands of years. So perhaps the conflict over their safety shouldn't be about whether they are safe for humans to consume, but rather how they will impact long term.Even though Genetically Modified Foods (GMF) would increase food costs, these can improve yields for farmers, provide nutritional benefits,and help to alleviate the increasing global population of third world countries.
GMO foods are not the most healthy or honest foods, but they are the most helpful. Many fruits and vegetables are engineered to be resistant to bugs and diseases that could cause famine. This helps farmers all over the country by giving them a better harvest. Also, non-sanitary soil has become a large problem in some places around the world. The soil made it harder for crops to grow in certain environments. To solve this problem, scientists could take a gene from a plant that can live in these conditions, and plant it into another crop’s genome. This would make the crop that