Are Genetically Modified food really that bad, if it feeds the millions of starving people???

Question

Or should those people just be left to die a painful lingering death???

Answer 1

Genetically modified organisms are not bad. What happened is that the gene from a specie of plant was added to another one (taking the gene that protects against a disease and putting it in a plant that suffers from it), in the end, it is like eating a salad that contained both original plants together.
There are people who say that we are playing god, temperring with nature and blah-blah-blah. This is their choice to believe that GMO could be "toxic" or whatever (even if no one have ever brought any evidence of anything bad that happenned to someone or a test animal being adversely affected) so those people can eat whatever they want, including "organic" food that sells for twice the price, and can naturally mutate over time (as it happeend with the orange or the green califlower; those were just discovered in a field as the result of random mutation, and the seeds carefully gathered to create a new variety). If they think that mother nature does not genetically modify plants by herself, they are dead wrong.
So, in the end, it can be simple enough. If you have genetically modifies food, simply have it labelled approriately, and let the people decide if they want it or not. At the same time, genetically modified food should never be rushed into tha market or given away to starving people to turn them into test subject to verify if it is indeed free of side effect. And I do believe that the food distributed so far has indeed been properly tested. If the president of the company that makes genetically modified food is willing to eat them, publicly, only the most stubborn anti-GMO would still protest, and those are probably beyond the point where they can be convinced otherwise, so it is futile to even try to argue with them.

Answer 2

Sustainability - In this case the ability for the earth to support the current population demography. Genetically Modified food plays with the delicate balance of nature. Peoiple starve today and people will starve tommorow, lets not sacrifice our planets resourses for those cultures who cant figure out the food population balance.

Answer 3

Geneticlly modified food are not too bad but the pesticides used to crop it are very harmful to human. Seeds which sold by the Multinationals Like Mansanto, are used every where resowing cannot be done or other words parent seeds cannot be taken from them. The seeds that swon suck the fertility of the land within in few harvest make the land as imponent. The grain production around the world is enough for mankind but we have too little heart to distribute to poors.

Answer 4

There is nothing wrong with GM foods. There is no way the can physically harm us (assuming they're not specifically modified to be toxic).

MY main concern with GM is that a company could create a plant that requires a certain chemical to survive. That company could have a copyright on that chemical and sell it for whatever they wanted to.

Since their seeds are copyrighted, farmers are not allowed to save seeds from year to year and are required to purchase new seeds every year. This increases costs and is putting a lot of farmers out of business.

Answer 5

Its not bad at all EXCEPT when the food is modified in a way that cause cancer and other problems....so If its made right no

Answer 6

The GM question is a difficult one. There are a lot of potential long-term risks in the proliferation of GM food. GM food may be completely safe, but certain modifications of the genome of food could lead to strange side-effects as foreign genes express themselves in ways that were unanticipated.

For example, a type of widely-used GM corn (Bt-corn, by Monsanto) produces its own pesticides; however, it was unknown that this pesticide would also kill monarch butterflies. As the genes from this corn spread to natural corn, the threat to monarch butterflies spreads too. Some people find the loss of monarch butterflies not only sad but potentially dangerous. Additionally, it is not difficult to extrapolate this example to something that seems more obviously dangerous, like a GM food that makes an impact on a keystone species whose loss could change an entire ecosystem. Plus, what if there are long-term health effects of ingesting GM food that simply have not been fully understood yet?

Let me setup another example. Imagine cows that are modified to grow larger muscles. Because of this, they need to ingest more protein. Their vegetable-based feed doesn't contain enough protein, so farmers start grinding up dead cows to feed to the live cows. These cows weren't adapted to be carnivores, and certainly were not adapted to eat themselves, and end up picking up a few transmissible spongiform encephalopathy prions. Humans who eat those cows also pick up those prions. Years later, those healthy humans suffer a strange disease of the brain that eventually leads to a coma, brain death, and then actual death. It is found that this disease came from ingesting the cow meat and the disease is called "mad cow." Can you imagine such a scenario?

Additionally, even if GM food is safe, it's nearly impossible to actually keep GM food from naturally spreading. For example, recent studies have shown that there are no completely natural sunflowers anywhere in the United States. Pollen from GM sunflowers have spread to every natural sunflower, and now every natural sunflower contains geneticly engineered genes.

Now, it's true that there may be a great social good to creating new more robust crops. For example, Normal Borlaug's dwarf wheat (which is not a GM food, but is still an artificially generated food) made a huge impact on food production because its short size kept it from falling over in windy areas. Borlaug won a Nobel Peace Prize for this. There is much potential that GM can be used to create more foods that can survive in non-traditional environoments and have very high yields.

However, is the solution to the starvation problem really more food? The starvation problem is caused by a population expansion, and an EXCESS of food is one of the things driving that expansion. If 2 million starving people in an area that can only support 100,000 are provided enough food to survive and reproduce, the result can be to 4 million starving people in an area that can only support 100,000 (and as this process continues, the land can be destroyed and eventually not support even that many people).

Additionally, the BIOMASS needed to create food to feed people (that is, the biomass needed to BUILD NEW PEOPLE) has to come from somewhere. The rate of biomass uptake by the growing human population is driving a staggering number of species to extinction per day, and that's without even considering human impacts on the environment.

It has been suggested that technology cannot simply keep increasing the rate of food production to keep ahead of the rate of population increase. The industrial revolution did it once, but eventually these increases must saturate as we simply run out of the biomass to fuel the expansion.

So really I think it's probably naive to consider that:

a) The solution to starvation is increased food production.

b) The alternative to not increasing food production is painful lingering death. (after all, this simply is not true; while there may be painful lingering death, this has nothing to do with not increasing food production)

The "solution" to starvation requires actions much more proactive than simply increasing food. Increasing food is a band-aid that will only lead to even more starvation. The human population has never faced a non-natural-disaster-based famine before agriculture was invented. It is increased food production that drives human expansion which leads to famine. And that's why it's dangerous to assume that increased food production is the only tool available to us. Perhaps we can simply be more judicious about how we donate food. Rather than giving an excess, perhaps there is a way of giving enough to keep the population from growing at a staggering rate while still keeping those in the population comfortable.

Keep in mind that ecologists say that the number one problem facing the planet (much worse than global warming) is the unsustainable growth of the human population (sometimes known as the "biodiversity crisis"). Most of this growth is happening in third world, and it is fueled by the agricultural subsidies that lead to excess food produced in the United States (and other "first world" countries) and shipped to the third world.

So I'm not sure if that's going to be a satisfactory answer for you; however, I hope you can see that this is a much more complicated problem than it may seem at first. It's about safety. It's about health. It's about biodiversity. It's about the CAUSES of starvation. Starvation is *NOT* caused by having too little food; it's caused by having too much.

Answer 7

I feel the same, if it can stop people starving to death then it should be given to them. And I don't believe it gives people cancer or anything, its had so many tests done on it, they wouldn't give it to people if it wasn't safe.

Answer 8

yes because the food does not have the nutrients that the genuine food has. it can cause side effects and won't give much nutrition compared to the genuine food.