GMOs: Everything You Need to Know – EcoWatch

Source: GMOs: Everything You Need to Know – EcoWatch

Pros and Cons of GMOs

Pros of GMOs

As touched upon earlier, GMO crops are meant to provide benefits. For example, certain GMO crops technically require less pesticide, while other GMO crops can achieve higher yields or withstand droughts.

Added Nutritional Value

Some GMOs can also boost a food’s nutritional value, although this area has been mired in controversy. Take Golden Rice, which is just white rice that’s been modified with Vitamin A to help prevent blindness and other Vitamin A deficiencies, especially in children, in developing countries. While a good idea in theory, Golden Rice has been caught in a 20-plus-year battle due to opponents who question the rice’s safety and effectiveness. Although the Philippines approved Golden Rice for the commercial market in 2020, it has yet to reach consumers.

Increased Food Supply

Besides the potential to add nutritional value, GMOs are another way to possibly reduce world hunger. Food demand is expected to grow 70 percent by 2050, and that requires even more deforestation going forward. However, GMO crops could prevent that in a number of ways, such as employing modifications that would double production yields without requiring additional land. That’s already the case with cotton crops in developing countries, where GMO cotton has increased yields in India and China. Although GMO food crops are currently banned in India and other nations that could benefit from an increased food supply.

Combat Climate Change

Then there are climate crisis considerations. There are studies indicating that GMO crops have reduced pesticide spraying by 8.7 percent, while less soil tillage and fuel dependence have decreased greenhouse gas emissions that are the equivalent to 15 million fewer cars on the road. Additionally, larger GMO crop yields resulting from drought resistance, among other reasons, have reduced the need for farmers to acquire more land. Scientists are also researching ways that GMOs can actively fight climate change, such as altering plants that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, require less sunlight or convert nitrogen for growth purposes. GMO crops could even reduce methane emissions from livestock by employing plants that create less methane from consumption.

Cons of GMOs

Besides the negative health implications and increased herbicide usage already covered, there are additional drawbacks for the environment and farmers.

Superweeds

There have been claims connecting GMO crops to superweeds, where, instead of reducing a reliance on pesticides, certain crops have become more herbicide resistant, thus requiring greater usage of weedkillers such as Monsanto’s Roundup. The elephant in the room is the fact that until recently Monsanto owned the majority of the country’s GMO seeds. Roundup has been linked to thousands of cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leading to a $10 billion settlement from Bayer, who acquired Monsanto in 2018. A 2018 study stated that 38 global weed species have become resistant to glyphosate.

Decreased Pest Resistance

Insects, similar to weeds, are becoming increasingly tolerant of pest-resistant GMO crops, particularly cotton and corn. Known as Bt crops (Bacillus thuringiensis), due to the type of bacteria that makes them pest-resistant, they initially worked to resist common threats such as bollworms and rootworms, and reduced the need for insecticides. However, new strains of these pests are no longer deterred by GMO crops modified to resist them, re-upping the need for insecticides.

Biodiversity Loss

Increased Roundup and herbicide usage has also been tied to dwindling monarch butterfly populations, one of many biodiversity issues. That’s because the toxin also kills milkweed, the main diet for monarchs and commonly found in crop fields.

Farmer Suicides

In recent decades, India has attracted attention for its farmer suicide rate, which some have attributed to the GMO industry. There have been about 300,000 farmer suicides in the past twenty years, and biotech opponents blame these on the GMO cotton sector, which is the only industry allowed to use GM crops. The majority of the country’s cotton comes from modified Bt cotton seeds. The supposed problem is the rising cost of these seeds, which many farmers can’t afford and often go into debt for in order to buy them; bad crops and fluctuating global cotton prices often create a debt spiral that’s hard to recover from. Yet there are studies that dispute a connection between Bt cotton and farmer suicide rates, instead suggesting that the reverse is true due to higher crop yields.

Besides the theory that Bt cotton is sending growers into debt, there’s the other issue of bollworms becoming resistant to GMO cotton, requiring heavier doses of pesticides. Due to different regulations, it’s not uncommon for fieldworkers to apply toxic chemicals without the proper protection, or even shoes and masks.

Adding another layer, a different paper found that small farms were at a higher risk for suicide rates than large ones since they depend more on rainwater for successful crops than large operations, which use irrigation pumps. If anything, the study authors found the bigger problem is the threat of groundwater shortages for large farms, since groundwater usage is unregulated.

Seed Sovereignty

Not least is the matter of seed sovereignty, giving farmers the freedom to use whatever seeds they wish, thereby decreasing reliance on major seed companies who favor patented GM seeds. Seed sovereignty is an ongoing issue that’s been ceding control to large corporations concerning which seeds farmers can plant.