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Real Food for The Hungry Essay

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How often do children who whine about eating their peas and carrots at the dinner table hear from their mothers, “You should appreciate the food on our table, there are starving kids in Africa.” Although parents use the preceding phrase as a guilt mechanism to trick their children into eating their veggies so they too can consume the vitamins and nutrients they need to grow, the reality behind the phrase is much deeper than most realize. People are starving in almost every part of the world and the solution to that problem has yet to be discovered. A solution that has been considered for some time now but recently has sparked more interest is the use of genetically modified foods to feed the hungry. Should genetically modified foods be …show more content…

In reality, the “life-science” companies are making large sums of money for their overpriced, mass-produced seeds in a short amount of time. Also, one of the reasons why companies price their genetically modified foods at such a high cost is because creating such seeds and testing them costs millions of dollars. The companies obviously want to protect themselves, so charging high rates for their customers turns out to be the “best” solution. Unfortunately, those high prices then restrict genetically modified seeds to small companies/farms who can afford those prices, or even worse, desperate farmers willing to go into more debt to try out the “miracle” seeds. Sadly enough, poor farmers are taking that risk. Farmers who are already poor from the lack of profitable crops would only put themselves in more debt by trying to purchase outrageously priced genetically modified seeds. Avery later argues, “The high cost of development and the monopoly on intellectual property also result in high prices, making seed costs prohibitive for most independent farmers… Thus, technology that originally was invented to prevent world hunger is not accessible to those who need it most” (Avery).

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