Genetically Modified Foods Essay

Nazanin Nafeipoor
    2/16/2012

                                Are GM Foods Appropriate for Our Future Food Markets?
        Both the developed and developing worlds are facing a critical moral choice in the controversial issue of genetically modified food, also known as genetically modified organisms and genetically engineered crops. Genetically modified organisms have had specific changes introduced into their DNA by genetic engineering techniques. Critics of these modifications speak dismissively of biotech foods and genetic pollution. The world population has topped 6 billion people and is predicted to double in the next 50 years. Ensuring and adequate food supply for this booming population is going to be a major challenge in the years to come, one of the solutions for this problem can be GM foods, but because of the advantages and disadvantages of this technology, still there is ambiguity about it, so it can not catch the trust of people yet. The argument are based on three areas of concern: the impact on the natural environment, the size of the benefit to the small farmer if the owners and distributors are gain companies and the long term effects of GM foods on human and animal health and nutrition.
        GM foods promise to meet this need in a number of ways: pest resistance crop losses from insect pests can be staggering, resulting in devastating financial loss for farmers and starvation in developing countries. Farmers typically use many tons of chemical pesticides annually. Consumers do not wish to eat food that has been treated with pesticides because of potential health hazards, and run-off agricultural wastes from excessive use of pesticides and fertilizer can poison the water supply and cause harm to the environment. Growing GM foods such B.T., or Bacillus thuringiensis, corn can help eliminate the application of chemical pesticides and reduce the cost of bringing a crop to market(US Patent,2001), and there are many viruses, fungi and...