Are genetically engineered foods the cure for world food issues?

Question

I am writing a speech on genetically engineered foods, I need to know what are benefits, risks, and if the benefits outweigh the risks. I need to collect multiple view points of this question. Then I need to analyze it and formulate a statement to present in my speech.

Answer 1

As you can probably guess from the previous posts - this is controversial issue.

GM foods do indeed have the *potential* to be greatly beneficial for helping with food issues:
You can make a crop resistant to drought, so it can be grown in more arid regions. Or make it resistant to cold, so it can be grown in colder areas.
You can (as dranders_phd has pointed out) insert a resistance gene to some herbicides, allowing you to use that herbicide as pest control, where you might not have been able to previously (if your crop was vulnerable to it, for example).
You can make your crop resistant to a disease or pest, by making it produce natural pesticides (like the bacterial Bt toxin, a natural insecticide harmless to humans).
You can change the nutritional qualities of the crop, providing better nutrition to people eating it (for an example of this, see "golden rice" wikipedia entry below - a rice engineered to provide vitamin A, and to provide this to areas where up to 2 million people die each year as a result of vitamin A deficiency).
Similarly, you can engineer an increased yield into the crop - for example by making the crops "dwarf" varieties. A plant that put less effort into growing a long stem can put more effort into making more seeds. And there are genes which control the number of seed-heads a plant will have, that can be manipulated.
You can even engineer oral vaccines into crops, meaning you wouldn't need to vaccinate people by needle (an expensive undertaking).

Many people simply object to this kind of thing as "playing god".
Even without such luddite-like though, there *are* some genuine objections:
During the process of genetic modification, you generally "amplify" your gene-of-interest by growing it in bacteria (by "transfecting" the bacteria with your gene). The way you determine which bacteria contain your gene-of-interest is by co-transfecting them with an antibiotic-resistance gene; so you can grow your bacteria in the presence of that antibiotic and the only ones that will actually grow are the ones with your gene. When you subsequently transfect your gene into plant tissue, the antibiotic-resistance genes goes along with it. This has no effect on the plant (as plants are not typically vulnerable to antibiotics in the first place), but often the gene inserts itself "randomly" into the plant's DNA. The places where this it likely to occur are called "hot-spots", and are regions where the structure of the DNA makes it more likely that DNA will hop in and out of the genome (which is how your gene gets in in the first place). It is theoretically possible that the antibiotic resistance can therefore "hop" out again and into other bacteria. These other bacteria will therefore be resistant to the antibiotic - and you might have problems if this is a pathogenic bacteria.
I should mention that this *is* unlikely - but it is also possible.
Of course - the more work gets done, and the more we understand about phenomena like these "hot spots", the less and less likely this is to happen.

A similar problem is accidental crossbreeding of your "super crop" with related wild plants, generating a "super-weed" that isn't useful as a crop, but has (for example) the herbicide resistance gene, making it difficult to control, and actually leading to *increased* use of other herbicides.

Another objection people often cite is that crops that are resistant to a disease might spread out of the fields, and become a "weed" in the wider world, because they can resist the diseases the natural plants cannot. This will reduce the biodiversity of the area, which is generally a bad thing.

Yet another objection is to the use of "Terminator Technology". This was an effort to prevent the above "super weeds" problems by ensuring that the plants grown from the GM seeds were always sterile (they make seeds, but those seeds won't grow themselves). This means that your crop cannot cross-breed with wild varieties, and that it cannot "escape" from the field and become a super-weed. Unfortunately, it also means that poorer farmers cannot save the "extra" seeds from one year's harvest to plant next year, and means they must *always* buy new seeds from the companies.

If you want *my* opinion, GM has, like all technological advances, the potential to be really good, or really bad. And I don't think we understand enough yet to use it properly. Some features we can insert - like increased yield, or providing vitamin A - are unlikely by themselves to be harmful. Other traits - like herbicide or pathogen resistance - certainly have potential problems. And the antibiotic-resistance issue is one to watch in all GM.
However - more work will allow a better understanding of all of these issues.
I am pro-GM ... just not yet.

Answer 2

No, engineered foods will not do anything to solve world hunger. There is no money in feeding the poor so why should companies like Monsanto just give up their patents so the poor can grow food? Not gonna happen.

There are more dangers than benefits to genetically engineered foods. Some alterations are made to make a plant resistant to a certain herbicide. Theory goes that you should need less herbicides to get rid of a certain weed. But in actuality the engineered genes can transfer to the weeds thus making the weeds resistant to the herbicide that was supposed to kill them. This has already happened in Denmark and will happen wherever genetically engineered are used with completely unpredictable results and implications to biodiversity.

Answer 3

Actually, many people think that the use of genetically engineered and modified foods are what is causing many of the health problems that countries such as the United States are experiencing today.

For example, the rise in obesity has been linked to the use of high fructose corn syrup in foods instead of sugar. While some think that the use of genetically engineered grains have been potentially linked to the rise in autism among children.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

Money is the cure for food shortages. If there is not enough money to be made in farming, farmers won't farm. In the US there is land available for cultivation or for raising animals for food. But no one is going to do it and lose money in the process.

Answer 6

For arguments against g.m see www.soilassociation.org and www.whyorganic.org.
For the other point of view, there is the monsanto website, www.monsanto.co.uk