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The Impact Of Genetically Modified Organisms On Farmers

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Genetically Modified Organisms Effect on Small Farmers
Introduction
Genetically modified organisms are developed in a laboratory and the process is scientist take a gene of a specific species and insert genes in to another species. Genetically modified organisms are portrayed as a new idea and dates to the 1970’s. According to a candidate in the Biological Sciences in Public Health at Harvard, Gabriel Rangel, stated Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen worked together and created a way to cut a gene from an organism and transfer that gene to another organism. This was the start of genetically modified genetics (Rangel 2016). With the start of Genetically modified organisms the United states government monitored closely with corporations …show more content…

For the United States, the small farmers saw savings when planting the herbicide tolerant soybean and saw a total annual national farm income increase from $5 million to approximately $202.6 million in 2015. The GM seeds have proven themselves to be cost effective because the use of pesticides on the crops can add up costing the small farmers more while the GM seeds will save money because they do not need to be combined with the use of pesticides (Pocket 2016).
Hunger has always been an issue in underdeveloped countries such as Africa and India. These types of countries have an issue of food insecurity which is not having adequate access to sufficient and safe foods for consumption. Matin Qaim and Shahzad Kouser wrote a journal about “Genetically Modified Crops and Food Security” which explained how genetically modified crops have a positive effect on production of food and availability. One specific GMO was the Bacillus thuringiensis cotton or Bt cotton which is grown all around India, China, Pakistan and other developing countries (Qaim and Kouser 2013). The significance of Bt cotton is that provides resistant to insects and the adoption reduces chemical pesticides and increases farmers’ fields. Bt cotton shows that it increases income for the households in the underdeveloped countries and higher incomes lead to increase in food consumption in the farms in these types of countries.
Small farmers with limited land can find

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