Scientists claim GMO food will solve world’s persisting problem of starvation and hunger, be more nutritious, tastier, hardier than natural food, economically and environmentally friendly since GMO food does not require pesticides. GMO food, which can be very well grown in massive proportions, can stave off world hunger and possibly lower the percentage; however, in reality, growing GMO food alone will be financially straining to farmers, possibly arouse new diseases, allergies, and bodily problems, and corrupt nature’s order by accidentally transferring their genes or resistances.
GMO food allows the world to produce food at a much faster rate, and slacks off stress of fending off bugs and disease from natural food. However, genetically modified food is currently leading to overall decrease of world population in an unsafe manner, unprecedented gene transfer to non-target species, and there is the high risk of reduced effectiveness of pesticides, as bugs get used to the modified food’s resistances.
Genetically Modified Food is slowly leading to the overall lowering of the international populace in an unjustified manner. According to naturalsociety.com, scientists tested all sorts of animals such as mice, pigs, cows, rats and buffalo to test this claim. As each of these animals were fed higher and higher concentrations of GMO foods such as corn, they all suffered the same outcome; infertility, frequent abortions, fewer amount of and much weaker offspring, and even death of some of the babies’ parents. In extreme cases, a few hamsters even had hair grown inside their mouths, mice testes grew smaller and their sperm count decreased, and pigs gave birth to bags of water. Due to the correlation of animal symptoms and humans related to food and disease over the years, GMO food and not just corn, is being linked to rising levels of human infant mortality, dropping sperm counts, and sterilization.
As GMO foods become much more prevalent worldwide, there will be destructive gene transfer to non-target species. According to gmo-compass.org, the movement of genetic material between unrelated species, such as hornets and wheat crops, is called the horizontal gene transfer. This type of gene transfer is arduously hard to detect, and all GMO food crops are tainted with the ability to become much more sturdier and resilient. Currently, the rates of such gene transfer is extremely low (one out of a trillion) but if GMO foods are grown over a large area (which is predicted to happen) it would certainly happen and pose a grave threat. In fact, this feared event is already happening in France, where genetically modified food crops have been exchanging genes with nearby weeds making them stronger and hardier, which would probably make these pests much harder to get rid of than before.
Bugs, such as mosquitoes, will eventually gain resistance to the Genetically modified foods’ natural wards and become much harder to get rid of in late years. According to gmo-compass.org and holistic.com, BT is the most commonly used pesticide which is “naturally” produced inside such genetically modified food in a wide range, from corn, potatoes, fruits, and vegetables. Although the BT toxin is said to be “very specific” in which bugs to ward off, it still has a chance to harm non-targeted insects. There was research in 1999 in Arizona, which revealed insects would get used to BT tainted crops, such as cotton, would get resistant to them very quickly such as bollworms. The main problem was that these BT resistant worms could spread its resistance to other natural bollworms, rapidly expanding the population of bollworms of those who are inexorable to BT.
Overall, the world should ban GMO food since its cons outweigh its benefits by a large margin. If people continue to consume GMO food, which is happening in this exact moment, they will eventually lose the ability to be fertile, and the babies who are born from GMO food-consuming parents will be more susceptible to death. Like how mosquitoes became resistant to DDT, such pestering bugs will become resistant to the GMO foods’ resistances and might pose a greater harm to people later on. GMO foods, due to their altered gene structure, have a chance to pass on their genes toward non-target species, which cannot be fixed. If GMO foods were banned, people would be able to consume food that is naturally grown, and causes little harm compared to those who consume GMO foods. In my opinion, people should have healthy, natural food rather than genetically modified food which have countless amounts of risks.
