Ganetic
Essay by 24 • November 12, 2010 • 823 Words (4 Pages) • 1,222 Views
o Enhanced taste and quality
o Reduced maturation time
o Increased nutrients, yields, and stress tolerance
o Improved resistance to disease, pests, and herbicides
o New products and growing techniques
* Animals
o Increased resistance, productivity, hardiness, and feed efficiency
o Better yields of meat, eggs, and milk
o Improved animal health and diagnostic methods
* Environment
o "Friendly" bioherbicides and bioinsecticides
o Conservation of soil, water, and energy
o Bioprocessing for forestry products
o Better natural waste management
o More efficient processing
* Society
o Increased food security for growing populations
Controversies
* Safety
o Potential human health impact: allergens, transfer of antibiotic resistance markers, unknown effects Potential environmental impact: unintended transfer of transgenes through cross-pollination, unknown effects on other organisms (e.g., soil microbes), and loss of flora and fauna biodiversity
* Access and Intellectual Property
o Domination of world food production by a few companies
o Increasing dependence on Industralized nations by developing countries
o Biopiracy--foreign exploitation of natural resources
* Ethics
o Violation of natural organisms' intrinsic values
o Tampering with nature by mixing genes among species
o Objections to consuming animal genes in plants and vice versa
o Stress for animal
* Labeling
o Not mandatory in some countries (e.g., United States)
o Mixing GM crops with non-GM confounds labeling attempts
* Society
o New advances may be skewed to interests of rich countries
http://scope.educ.washington.edu/gmfood/index.php
What Are the Benefits? Genetically modified foods (GM foods or GMF) offer a way to quickly improve crop characteristics such as yield, pest resistance, or herbicide tolerance, often to a degree not possible with traditional methods. Further, GM crops can be manipulated to produce completely artificial substances, from the precursors to plastics to consumable vaccines. What are the Risks? The power of genetic modification techniques raises the possibility of human health, environmental, and economic problems, including unanticipated allergic responses to novel substances in foods, the spread of pest resistance or herbicide tolerance to wild plants, inadvertent toxicity to benign wildlife, and increasing control of agriculture by biotechnology corporations.
http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/DOCREP/003/X9602E/X9602E00.HTM
A range of opinions in the debate on GMOs
(Quotations from the English-language media)
Food security
"To feed 10.8 billion people by 2050 will require us to convert 15 million square miles of virgin forest, wilderness and marginal land into agrochemical-dependent arable land. GM crops hold the most important key to solve future problems in feeding an extra 5 billion mouths over the next 50 years."
Michael Wilson of the Scottish Crops Research Institute, in 1997
"The greatest threat to food security on earth is the concentration of the food chain in the hands of a few rich and powerful players.... This attempt to control the food chain, through developing genetically modified organisms, threatens to turn them into the hunger merchants of the third millennium."
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