Genetically Modified Foods

Read Complete Research Material



Genetically Modified foods

Food is a kind of energy that makes people healthy and strong. It is the most requisite thing for people in order to survive. Therefore, people always need food. At the same time, population of the world has increased a lot. Now, it is about 6 billion and in 2025 about 8.3 billion people will live in the world. Rising population will bring a problem, which is feeding lots of people. Therefore, some companies have already offered a solution to this problem, namely the second Green Revolution which is also called the Gene Revolution. It is associated with biotechnology. For example, by biotechnology, some genes from different species are transferred to crops to enable these crops to have herbicide resistance or they become resistant to other environmental effects. The companies such as Monsanto and Novartis use these technologies. The aim of using it is producing more food, improving food, providing nutritional security and increasing yields. Although these companies want to do these things, these methods do not actually work and they even bring some problems such as farmer's decreasing yield, causing health problems and decreasing the diversity.

Increased yield from genetically engineered crops is the utmost important argument used by the genetic engineering industry. Although Borlaug claims that yields are increasing for every farmer, the Gene Revolution has actually decreased yields. Shiva mentions that Ed Oplinger, professor of Agronomy at the University of Wisconsin, has been carrying out yield trials on soya bean for 25 years, on the basis of data he collected in 12 states that grow 30 percent of U.S soya; he found genetically engineered soya beans had 4 percent lower yields than conventional varieties. And she says that the higher yields only exist in falsified corporate generated data and she proves her claim with that It is not based on independently generated scientific data from farmers fields, but on unverified confidential data provided by the Monsanto Mahyco corporation, which is involved in selling BT cotton seeds. However, if the Gene Revolution decreases yields it is difficult for the farmers who use GM seed to stay in business. One of the solutions to this problem is government subsidies. In the movie called The Future of Food The study of the economic cost and benefits of BT corn the official U.S.D.A. statistics shows the cost of producing a bushel of corn is about $3.20, net return to farmer is about $2.20.? It clearly shows that the Gene Revolution cannot survive without subsidies.

The Gene Revolution has some bad effects on human health. Firstly, the increased use of pesticides and herbicides increases health risk. Monsanto produces roundup ready seed. It has herbicide resistance. In other words, when we spray roundup herbicide on roundup ready crops, they do not die. It causes a lot of health risks for human, because farmers spray herbicides through all of their field because they know their crops do not die, but when we eat these crops if we do not clean them we also eat herbicide ...
Related Ads