Genetically Modified Food
The topic of genetically modified food has been discussed for years and years. The sides argue on many aspects concerning the genetically modified food. The paradox concerning the genetically modified food constitutes in the following: there is an unimaginable amount of messages in the media about the resource shortage, problem of starvation in world and similar issues. At the same time genetically modified foods are able to provide a solution to the problem of hunger, providing the population of starving regions with food that is cheap and accessible. Arguments of people and groups who oppose the introduction of worldwide usage of genetically modified cultures include warnings about those cultures’ effect on human health being uninvestigated, concerns about local economies being dominated and pushed out of business by international giants and similar. However, the benefits, promised by implementation of genetically modified cultures in a worldwide scale hugely outweigh the currently known cons. The benefits include, first and foremost, providing starving people with food they can afford to buy, increase productivity and profitability of farmers, decrease the amount of chemicals used in the process of growing agricultures and improve the improve the overall quality of food products.
Food security is the issue that has been growing in its seriousness for decades. It is a common thing to hear about some African country or another region of the third world where people suffer from starvation on a daily basis. Where people often do not have enough food to even provide their children with nutrition. According to the calculations (Engel, Frenzel and Miller 329-336), the production of food in the world must be at least doubled to meet the existing expectation that keeps growing along with Earth’s population. The potential of genetically modified cultures to fulfill the needs of the world’s growing population is far from being fully explored even today, when GM cultures have been in use for several decades, at least in United States. Genetically modified products are able to make difference for people who desperately need it. They usually live in rural areas of developing countries where economy and level of production technology are not able to both produce the sufficient amount of food for the population and to import it from abroad. Genetically modified products can be engineered to be fitting the conditions of potentially any environment they are needed at. Modifications also often include plant’s sustainability to various chemicals, viruses, bacteria and similar threats. This allows to decrease costs on growing culture significantly as farmers have no more need in, for instance, purchasing some certain pesticides or herbicides as plants are simply immune to being damaged by those factors. In this way, not only farmers can save money on that, but to also harvest more in the end of the season. Lesser production costs and bigger harvests positively contribute to pricing tendencies in the agricultural sector of economy, making food cheaper for both growing and importing in the places that need it the most.
Not only genetic …
