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Genetically modified food essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: genetically modified food: benefits, risks, and ethical considerations.

Thesis Statement: This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of genetically modified (GM) food, exploring its potential benefits in agriculture and food security, examining the associated risks, and discussing the ethical implications of altering the genetic makeup of organisms.

• Introduction
• Understanding Genetic Modification: Techniques and Applications in Agriculture
• The Benefits of GM Food: Increased Crop Yields, Reduced Pesticide Use, and Improved Nutrition
• Potential Risks and Concerns: Environmental Impact, Allergenicity, and Long-Term Health Effects
• Ethical Dilemmas: Ownership of Genetic Resources, Consent, and Consumer Rights
• Regulation and Labeling: Balancing Innovation with Transparency
• Conclusion: The Complex Landscape of Genetically Modified Food

Essay Title 2: GMOs and Global Food Security: Examining the Role of Genetically Modified Crops

Thesis Statement: This essay focuses on the relationship between genetically modified crops and global food security, investigating how GM technology can address challenges such as population growth, climate change, and sustainable agriculture.

• The Global Food Crisis: Feeding a Growing Population
• GM Crops as a Solution: Drought Resistance, Pest Tolerance, and Enhanced Nutrition
• Environmental Considerations: Sustainable Farming and Reduced Carbon Footprint
• Challenges and Criticisms: Concerns About Corporate Control and Biodiversity
• Case Studies: Success Stories and Lessons from GM Crop-Adopting Countries
• Conclusion: The Promise and Pitfalls of Genetically Modified Crops for Food Security

Essay Title 3: Informed Consumer Choices: GMO Labeling and the Right to Know

Thesis Statement: This essay explores the debate over GMO labeling, emphasizing the importance of transparency in food labeling, consumers' right to know about GM ingredients, and the implications of labeling policies on the food industry and public perception.

• The GMO Labeling Movement: Origins, Goals, and Advocacy
• Transparency vs. Industry Interests: The Controversy Surrounding Labeling Laws
• Consumer Perceptions: Trust, Skepticism, and Informed Decision-Making
• Global Perspectives: Labeling Practices in Various Countries
• Impact on the Food Industry: Compliance, Product Formulation, and Market Trends
• Conclusion: Balancing Consumer Rights and Industry Interests in GMO Labeling

Gmo Good Or Bad

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Should Genetically Modified Organisms Be Labeled

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The Arguments for Genetically Modified Food

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Gmos: History, Effects, and Controversies

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Genetically modified foods (GM foods), also known as genetically engineered foods (GE foods), or bioengineered foods are foods produced from organisms that have had changes introduced into their DNA using the methods of genetic engineering.

The first genetically modified food approved for release was the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994. It was engineered to have a longer shelf life by inserting an antisense gene that delayed ripening. China was the first country to commercialize a transgenic crop in 1993 with the introduction of virus-resistant tobacco. In 1995, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) Potato was approved for cultivation, making it the first pesticide producing crop to be approved in the US.

Genetically modified foods are usually edited to have some desired characteristics, including certain benefits for surviving extreme environments, an enhanced level to nutrition, the access of therapeutic substances, and the resistance genes to pesticide and herbicides. These characteristics could be beneficial to humans and the environment in certain ways.

Studies show that GMO crops have fewer chances of mutating compared to non-GMO crops. Over 12% of global farmland grows GMO crops. 54% of all GMOs worldwide grow in the Third World countries. Soybeans count for half of all GMO crops grown worldwide.

Relevant topics

• Natural Selection
• Mathematics in Everyday Life
• Engineering
• Space Exploration
• Agriculture

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The GMO debate

August 15, 2018

The issue of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as they relate to the food supply is an ongoing, nuanced and highly contentious issue.

Individuals from the scientific and medical fields fall on both sides of the argument, some claiming that genetically modified crops are helping to solve issues concerning hunger, environmental sustainability and an increasing global population, while others believe they’re doing more harm than good.

With studies supporting both sides, many wonder: Who should we believe? To give a clearer sense of the issues and arguments that surround GMOs, Dr. Sarah Evanega, a plant biologist, and Dr. David Perlmutter, a neurologist, weigh in from opposing sides. Here’s what they had to say:

What’s your stance on GMO food?

Dr. Sarah Evanega: Genetically modified organism (GMO) food is safe. In that respect, my stance mirrors the position taken by the National Academies of Sciences and the majority of the world’s scientific community.

I eat GMO foods, as do my three young children, because I’m confident in the safety of these products. I support GMO food because I’m convinced that GMO crops can help reduce poverty and hunger among smallholder farmers in developing nations. They can also lessen the environmental impact of agriculture in general.

Genetic engineering is a tool that can help us breed crops that resist drought, diseases, and insect pests, which means farmers achieve higher yields from the crops they grow to feed their families and generate extra income. We have seen, time and again, that farmers who grow GMO crops in Africa, and South and East Asia earn extra money that helps them do things we Westerners take for granted — like send their children to school and buy a propane stove so they no longer have to cook over fires fueled by cow dung.

In developing nations, much of the weeding is done by women and children. By growing crops that can tolerate herbicide applications, the children are freed up to attend school and the women have time to earn income to help support their families.

I know many of the scientists who are using genetic engineering to breed improved crops, and I’ve witnessed their dedication to making the world a better place. I support GMO food because I’ve seen first-hand how it can improve people’s lives. For farmers, access to GMOs is a matter of social and environmental justice.

Dr. David Perlmutter: Genetic modification of agricultural seeds isn’t in the interest of the planet or its inhabitants. Genetically modified (GM) crops are associated with an increased use of chemicals, like glyphosate , that are toxic to the environment and to humans. These chemicals not only contaminate our food and water supplies, but they also compromise soil quality and are actually associated with increased disease susceptibility in crops.

This ultimately leads to an increase in the use of pesticides and further disrupts ecosystems. And yet, despite these drawbacks, we haven’t seen increased yield potential of GM crops, although that has always been one of the promises of GM seeds.

Fortunately, there are innovative alternatives to the issue of food insecurity that are not dependent on using GM crops.

Is GMO really less healthy than non-GMO food? Why or why not?

SE: From a health perspective, GMO food is no different than non-GMO food. In fact, they can even be healthier. Imagine peanuts that can be genetically engineered to reduce levels of aflatoxin , and gluten-free wheat , which would give those with celiac disease a healthy and tasty bread option. GM corn has cut levels of naturally-occurring mycotoxin — a toxin that causes both health problems and economic losses — by a third.

Other GMO foods, such as vitamin A-enriched Golden Rice , has been fortified with vitamins and minerals to create healthier staple foods and help prevent malnutrition.

In general, though, the process of engineering crops to contain a certain trait, such as pest-resistance or drought-tolerance, does nothing to affect the nutrient quality of food. Insect-resistant Bacillus thuringiensis   (Bt) crops actually reduce or eliminate the need for pesticide applications, which further improves their healthfulness and safety.

We have seen this in Bangladesh, where farmers would spray their traditional eggplant crops with pesticides right up until the time of harvest — which meant farmers were getting a lot of pesticide exposure and consumers were getting a lot of pesticide residue. Since growing pest-resistant Bt eggplant, however, they’ve been able to greatly reduce their pesticide applications . And that means GMO crops are healthier not only for the farmer, but the consumer.

Similarly, studies have shown a new disease-resistant GMO potato could reduce fungicide use by up to 90 percent . Again, this would certainly result in a healthier potato — especially since even organic farmers use pesticides.

I understand that people have legitimate concerns about highly processed foods, such as baked goods, breakfast cereals, chips, and other snacks and convenience foods, which are often made from corn, soy, sugar beets, and other crops that are genetically engineered. It’s the manufacturing process, however, that makes these items less healthy than whole foods, like fruits, vegetables, and grains. The origin of the ingredients is irrelevant.

DP: Without question, the various toxic herbicides that are liberally applied to GM crops are having a devastating effect. In terms of the nutritional quality of conventional versus GM food, it’s important to understand that mineral content is, to a significant degree, dependent on the various soil-based microorganisms. When the soil is treated with glyphosate, as is so often the case with GM crops, it basically causes sterilization and deprives the plant of its mineral absorption ability.

But to be fair, the scientific literature doesn’t indicate a dramatic difference in the nutritional quality comparing conventional and GM agricultural products in terms of vitamins and minerals.

It is now, however, well-substantiated that there are health risks associated with exposure to glyphosate. The World Health Organization has characterized glyphosate as a “ probable human carcinogen .” This is the dirty truth that large agribusiness doesn’t want us to understand or even be aware of. Meanwhile, it’s been estimated that over 1.6 billion kilograms of this highly toxic chemical have been applied to crops around the world. And to be clear, GM herbicide-resistant crops now account for more than 50 percent of the global glyphosate usage.

The connection between GM crops and use of chemicals poses a significant threat to the health of humans and our environment.

Does GMO food affect the health of the environment? Why or why not?

SE: GMOs have a positive impact on the health of the environment. Recently, a meta-analysis of 20 years of data found that growing genetically modified insect-resistant corn in the United States has dramatically reduced insecticide use. By suppressing the population of damaging insect pests, it’s also created a “halo effect” that benefits farmers raising non-GM and organic vegetable crops, allowing them to reduce their use of pesticides, too.

We’re also seeing the use of genetic engineering to breed crops that can produce their own nitrogen, thrive in dry conditions, and resist pests. These crops will directly benefit environmental health by cutting the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and water. Other researchers are working to accelerate the rate of photosynthesis, which means crops can reach maturity quicker, thus improving yields, reducing the need to farm new land, and sparing that land for conservation or other purposes.

Genetic engineering can also be used to reduce food waste and its associated environmental impact. Examples include non-browning mushrooms , apples, and potatoes, but could also be expanded to include more perishable fruits. There’s also tremendous potential in regard to genetically engineered animals, such as pigs that produce less phosphorus material.

In summary, GMO crops can have remarkable environmental benefits. They allow farmers to produce more food with fewer inputs. They help us spare land, reduce deforestation, and promote and reduce chemical use.

DP: No doubt. Our ecosystems have evolved to work in balance. Whenever harmful chemicals like glyphosate are introduced into an ecosystem, this disrupts the natural processes that keep our environment healthy.

The USDA Pesticide Data Program reported in 2015 that 85 percent of crops had pesticide residue. Other studies that have looked at the pesticide levels in groundwaters reported that 53 percent of their sampling sites contained one or more pesticides. These chemicals are not only contaminating our water and food supplies, they’re also contaminating the supplies for other organisms in the surrounding environment. So the fact that GM seeds now account for more than 50 percent of global glyphosate usage is certainly concerning.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, is that these chemicals are harming the soil microbiome. We are just now beginning to recognize that the various organisms living in the soil act to protect plants and make them more disease resistant. Destroying these protective organisms with the use of these chemicals weaken plants’ natural defense mechanisms and, therefore, will require the use of even more pesticides and other chemicals.

We now recognize that plants, like animals, are not autonomous, but rather exist in a symbiotic relationship with diverse microorganisms. Plants are vitally dependent upon soil microbes for their health and disease resistance.

To summarize, the use of pesticides for GM crops is disrupting ecosystems, contaminating the water and food supplies for the environment’s organisms, and harming the soil microbiome.

Is GMO food necessary to feed the entire world population? Why or why not?

SE:  With the world’s population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, farmers are now being asked to produce more food than they’ve produced in the entire 10,000-year history of agriculture. At the same time, we’re facing extreme climate change events, such as prolonged droughts and severe storms, that greatly impact agricultural production.

Meanwhile, we need to reduce the carbon emissions, water pollution, erosion, and other environmental impacts associated with agriculture, and avoid expanding food production into wild areas that other species need for habitat.

We can’t expect to meet these enormous challenges using the same old crop breeding methods. Genetic engineering offers us one tool for increasing yields and reducing agriculture’s environmental footprint. It’s not a silver bullet — but it’s an important tool in the plant breeder’s toolbox because it allows us to develop improved crops more quickly than we could through conventional methods. It also helps us work with important food crops like bananas, which are very difficult to improve through conventional breeding methods.

We certainly can feed more people by reducing food waste and improving food distribution and storage systems worldwide. But we can’t afford to ignore important tools like genetic engineering, which can do a lot to improve the productivity and quality of both crops and livestock.

The social and environmental problems that we face today are unprecedented in scale and scope. We must use all the tools available to address the challenge of feeding the world while taking care of the environment. GMOs can play a part.

DP:  The argument that we need GMO food to feed the entire world population is absurd. The reality of the situation is that GM crops have actually not increased the yield of any major commercialized food source . In fact, soy — the most widely grown genetically modified crop — is actually experiencing reduced yields. The promise of increased yield potentials with GM crops is one that we have not realized.

Another important consideration in terms of food security is the reduction of waste. It’s estimated that in the United States, food waste approaches an astounding 40 percent . Leading health commentators, like Dr. Sanjay Gupta, have been vocal on this issue and highlighted food waste as a key component of addressing the issue of food insecurity. So there’s definitely a big opportunity to reduce the amount of food that needs to be produced overall by cutting waste out of the supply chain.

Is there a viable alternative to GMO food? If so, what is it?

SE:  There’s no reason to seek an alternative to GMO foods, from a scientific, environmental, or health perspective. But if people wish to avoid GMO food they can purchase organic products. Organic certification does not allow the use of genetic engineering. However, consumers need to be aware that organic food does carry a rather hefty environmental and economic cost.

A recent study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that organic food costs at least 20 percent more than nonorganic food — a figure that can be even higher with certain products and in various geographic regions. That’s a significant difference for families living within a budget, especially when you consider that organic food is not any healthier than nonorganic foods, and both types of food typically have pesticide residues that fall well below federal safety guidelines.

Organic crops also have an environmental cost because they’re generally less productive and require more tilling than conventional and GM crops. They also use fertilizers from animals, which consume feed and water and produce methane gas in their waste. In some cases, take apples for example, the “natural” pesticides that organic growers use are far more toxic to humans and the environment than what conventional growers use.

In terms of plant breeding, some of the improvements that are possible with genetic engineering simply couldn’t be accomplished through traditional methods. Again, genetic engineering offers plant breeders an important tool that can result in a healthy, eco-friendly approach to agriculture. There’s simply no scientific reason to avoid this technology in producing food for the world’s growing population.

DP: Absolutely. There are many innovators working on solutions to sustainably solve the issue of food insecurity. One area of focus has been reducing the waste across the supply chain. For example, Apeel Sciences , a company that has raised funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, developed a natural coating that’s made of leftover plant skins and stems. It can be sprayed on produce to slow the ripening process and extend shelf life, which helps consumers and supermarkets alike reduce food waste.

In addition to this, forward-thinking researchers are now deeply involved in studying the microorganisms that live on and near plants in terms of how they function to enhance not only the health of plants, but the quality and quantity of nutrients that they produce. According to British agricultural researcher Davide Bulgarelli, in a recent article published by The Scientist, “Scientists are looking to manipulate soil microbes to sustainably increase crop production — and novel insights into the plant microbiome are now facilitating the development of such agricultural tactics.”

The research that looks at how microbes benefit plants is consistent with similar research relating microorganisms to human health. So another alternative is to harness and take full advantage of the beneficial interaction between microorganisms and plants to create a healthier and more productive agricultural experience.

Dr. Sarah Evanega is a plant biologist who earned her doctorate degree from Cornell University, where she also helped lead a global project to help protect the world’s wheat from wheat stem rust. She’s currently the director of the Cornell Alliance for Science , a global communications initiative that’s seeking to restore science to the policies and discussions around genetically engineered crops.

Dr. Perlmutter is a board-certified neurologist and four-time New York Timesbest-selling author. He received his MD from the University of Miami School of Medicine where he was awarded the Leonard G. Rowntree Research Award. Dr. Perlmutter is a frequent lecturer at symposia sponsored by institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, Yale University, Columbia University, Scripps Institute, New York University, and Harvard University, and serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He also serves on the board of directors and is a fellow of the American College of Nutrition.

This article first appeared on Healthline .

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Genetically Modified Crops: A Help or Harm?

Marcos Stoltzfus

Biology Senior Seminar

November 30th, 2005

Genetically Modified (GM) crops have several extremely valuable characteristics, yet also have quite a few drawbacks.   When considering the unknown implications of introducing such a creation to the natural world, it may become apparent that their use is unwise.

Introduction

History-Where did Genetically Modified Crops come from?

• Breeding vs. GM.

                                                               i.       Breeding’s history

1.       Example- corn

2.       Mendel

                                                             ii.       Distinctions in Methodology

                                                            iii.       Limitations

• Vectors of GM
• Possibilities and Realities of GM
• practicality

                                                               i.       Ht

                                                             ii.       Bt

                                                            iii.       Golden Rice

                                                           iv.       Other modifications

• Benefits of GM
• Nutritional value
• Concerns of GM
• Nutritional additives and allergies
• Bt Resistance
• Ecological consequences

                                                               i.       Kudzu vine

                                                             ii.       Monarch butterfly

                                                            iii.       super weeds

• Imprecision of GM

Imagine a day when food abounds in the world, where none grow hungry. Corn grows 12 feet tall, 5 ears on a stalk. It provides its own fertilizer, pesticides, and has all the essential nutrients in a single kernel.   With the marvels of modern day science, such an organism may not be so far off.   Such a super-plant may not be solely a thing of the imagination.   But consider if you will, what the trade offs may be for such an uber -organism. What unexpected genes have been inserted unintentionally into the juices of this fruit? What expense do we pay for having such a successful plant? What environmental disasters might we be unaware of that are just around the corner?  

Genetically Modified (GM) crops are certainly an intriguing and exciting technology that even now is looking forward to unexplored vistas.   We have already uncovered a vast array of possibilities, yet much remains to be discovered.   As GM crops make their way into a common existence in our world and on our plates, it is essential to know as much as we can about the true nature of these organisms.   When considering the unknown implications of introducing such creations into the natural world, it may become apparent that their use is unwise.

            Genetic modification is a relative newcomer to the science scene, arriving within the last twenty years.   Compared to such fields as astronomy, which the ancient Mayan civilization was using centuries ago, the realm of inserting genes into an organism is brand new.   In 1983, the first groups to insert foreign genes into a plant announced their success, almost simultaneously.   Three groups; from Washington University in St. Louis, The Monsanto Company, and University of Groningen in Belgium all announced on the same day that they had accomplished the feat ( Fuller , 2004).

            Several of the first discoveries included the use of bacterial antibiotic resistance genes which were spliced into tobacco plants of some kind ( Fuller , 2004).   Since that time many more advances have been made, and have been much more practical in their applications as well.   While these marvels are certainly exciting, we have always been able to ‘design’ plants to some degree using breeding techniques. But what separates Genetic Engineering (GE) and plant breeding?  

Breeding vs. Genetic Modification

            When discussing genetic modification, it is almost impossible to understand it without looking at its counterpart, plant breeding.   Ever since the Agricultural revolution at the dawn of civilization, humans have been modifying their crop plants, applying pressures different from those in the natural world.   This is called artificial selection. It involves humans directing the tools of evolution, forcing plants to exhibit traits we deem desirable ( Nottingham , 2003, p. 2).   This could be as simple as selecting for the healthiest plants that stand tallest, or perhaps those that produce the most fruit. One example of this is the corn plant.   Some scientists believe that the ancestor to the modern corn plant is called teosinte . This plant has only a few small ‘ears’ containing only several kernels, and has a much more branched structure to it.   The theory suggests that Native Americans may have applied pressures to it to make it more productive (more kernels/ear), and easier to harvest (one stalk vs. many) through artificial selection. This seems to be true, since these two organisms have been examined genetically, and found to be cousins ( Corn and Its Untamed Cousins , 2005). This is just one example of how humans have applied artificial selection to plants; to tailor them to fit our needs. Although humans have been doing this for centuries, one of the first individuals to explore this area scientifically was Gregor Mendel.

            Mendel is often considered to be the father of genetics because of the work he did studying heritability in pea plants.   Mendel was a monk at the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in the 1850’s.   A scholar and a clergyman, he worked with the common pea plant, and presented his work at the Natural Science Society of Brunn in 1865 ( Corcos & Monaghan , 1993, pp. 22-27).    Here Mendel framed the first understanding of inheritance, delineating the same ideas of dominance we use today.   These principles allow scientists to have a much better expectation of what will result from a cross between two plants.   Rather than using blind trial and error, we now have the tools and methods to gain a very good idea of how to proceed in order to get the results we desire.

            An important characteristic of breeding is that it occurs using the same methods as those found in nature.   Using sexual reproduction, plants with desirable traits can be crossed, in an effort to find offspring with the same traits, or a useful combination of traits.   In essence, this puts limitations on breeders concerning what crosses may be done.   Biological principles of diversity dictates that only related organisms may breed with each other successfully.   Several species of wheat may be able to interbreed, but may not exchange pollen with a banana tree resulting in viable offspring.   Using the methods developed by nature, this is simply not possible.  

            Genetic modification ignores these barriers through the use of methods not available in nature.   While breeding is limited to only organisms very closely related to one another, GM allows even barriers at the kingdom level to be overcome.   In a rather dramatic example, the gene coding for bioluminescence in fireflies was transferred to a tobacco plant, resulting in a plant glowing much as the common beetle ( Sengbusch , 2003).   

            Clearly in nature this kind of a cross would never be possible.   Simply put, the gene’s forms would be remarkably incompatible, not to mention the sexual structures of both the plant and the beetle.   The genes would not be accepted, and would never result in the light-giving plant that was attained in the laboratory.    This is a key difference between breeding and GM. Genetic modification is defined as the splicing of genes into an organism that would normally be outside the organism’s natural reproductive process ( Genetic Engineering , 2005).    But if the introduction of new genes cannot be done using natural methods, how do scientists accomplish this act?

Vectors of Genetic Modification

            Despite the fact that inter-kingdom breeding cannot occur naturally, there exists several examples of inter-kingdom gene transfer. This is usually done at the microscopic level, by bacteria or viruses. One commonly used vector is the use of the Agrobacterium bacteria. This is a bacterium that causes crown-gall disease in plants by transferring a plasmid into the plant cells, causing a phenotypic change at the source: a gall ( Fowler, Scott and Slater 2003, p.56).   Scientists have been able to utilize this phenomenon by having Agrobacterium carry and insert a desired gene into the plant. For example, the luciferase -producing gene.   By making cuttings and growing tissue cultures, the plants that have successfully taken in the gene can then be grown into new parent plants.

Similarly, viruses can be used to inoculate genes into plants. Viruses normally reproduce by inserting their own genes into a host cell, which turns the cell into a virus making factory.   By changing the genes the virus inserts to genes we’d like to see exhibited in the plant, we can successfully introduce new DNA into the target organism.   Each type of virus has a set of specifications as to which plant it can interact with, according to the type of plant it infects in nature. Some examples of transformation viruses are Brome Mosaic virus, caulimoviruses , and Gemini viruses. Each is specific according to the range of hosts and the type of DNA it uses to infect ( Walden , 1989 pp. 49-67).   These are two biological vectors, but scientists have another way to introduce new genetic material as well.

            The other vector is the gene gun. In simplified terms, this process involves taking many microscopic gold particles and covering them in the desired DNA.   These particles are then shot at high velocity at plant cells.   The DNA strands on the particles that land in the nucleus dissolve off, and inserts itself into the plant genome ( Fuller , 2004).   Afterwards, similar to the bacterial and viral vectors, plant tissues are grown, and watched to see which exhibit the trait.

Possibilities and Realities of Genetic Modification

            As touched on above, the theoretical possibilities for GM seem almost endless.   Like the glowing tobacco plant, it seems there is a startling potential of what could be implemented with the tools of GM at our disposal.   Reality dictates, however, that a great many of these are not practical, and therefore will not be explored.   The tobacco plant example, while interesting, and imagination-sparking, does not appear to have a great deal of sensible functions.   While we can do many things, only a few have actually been put into place on a large scale.   Most of the widespread modifications in use now are specifically designed for our modern agricultural model.   They aim to increase yields, and are adapted to modern farms.   Two of the most prevalent are herbicide tolerance and insect resistance.

            Nottingham (2003, p. 37) states that “herbicide resistance is the characteristic most commonly engineered into transgenic crop varieties grown in field trials.”   This trait can be extremely helpful to farmers in increasing effectiveness of crop growing. The basic idea of herbicide tolerance (Ht) is this.   When growing crops in a monocultural system (as in most US farms), a broad-spectrum herbicide is often used to control weeds and thereby increase yields.   The Monsanto Company has developed a strain of soybeans that are resistant to their herbicide, Roundup ™.   If farmers use this strain of soybean, they are able to use the herbicide on their fields, spraying less selectively, and not worrying about the effects to the crop plant ( Nottingham , 2003, pp. 37-42).   This development can increase the effectiveness of the herbicide, therefore increasing the yields of the crop, because the crop has much less competition from weeds that have been wiped out.

            The second most common modification is that of pest resistance.   One of the major problems farmers face aside from weeds, are the predation of animals on their crops.   This is mostly done by insects, specifically the orders Coleoptera (beetles) and Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths).   Consequently, GM plants have been developed to combat this problem.              

            Pesticides have been developed and used for a great number of years that include a naturally formed crystal from a common soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) .   This bacteria forms a crystal spore that is deadly to Lepidoptera larvae (caterpillars).   Sprays including this spore are widespread, and have been in use since 1920 ( Chein n .d .).   After the dawn of GM, some industrious scientists incorporated the gene encoding the Bt producing protein into plants, thereby allowing them to produce their very own pesticide ( Fuller , 2004).   Clearly, if a plant can produce its own pesticide, farmers will not need to use pesticides as frequently.

            There are a number of other modifications that are either in development or in use currently, but none are quite as prevalent as Ht or Bt.   One of these is Golden Rice.   According to Fowler, Scott and Slater ; (2003 pp. 247-248), “rice is one of the most important crops in the world” and in those areas where it is a staple, “vitamin A deficiency is a major nutritional problem.”   Golden rice, which produces vitamin A, was developed in an answer to this problem.   Naturally occurring rice does not produce this vitamin, but with golden rice, many will no longer face this deficiency.  

            Other modification plans include drought resistance, increased protein content, tolerance to frost, and even cotton that produces blue pigment, made especially for the blue jean industry ( Nottingham , 2003 pp. 69-79).

Benefits of Genetic Modification

            There are many possible benefits to society, industry, and our economy that GM may provide.   As discussed above, GM crops allow higher nutritional values to be incorporated into our foods.   Tomatoes are now being modified to be more nutritious, much like the Golden Rice ( Fuller , 2004).   This increase in nutrition can be especially important in third world countries, where access to a varied diet may be difficult.   These advances would help especially in the development of children, and therefore attracts much support.

            Another modification affects ripening. In crops such as tomatoes and coffee, the quality of the fruit is dependent on the ripeness stage at which they are picked.   Coffee, for example, only ripens a few beans each day, which must be picked within a very specific window of time.   With the advent of GM, coffee bushes have been engineered to ripen all their beans within a much smaller window.   This allows a farmer to pick all the beans at one time, thereby saving much in the way of labor and increasing efficiency greatly ( Rader , 2003).

            As discussed above, Bt and Ht crop varieties produce clear benefits for farmers.   In each case, a theoretical lessening of sprays is required, which helps to lessen costs to the farmer, and increases efficiency. According to Fuller (2004), “U.S. farmers used 450,000 kg less pesticides on Bt-cotton than they would have used on conventional varieties in 1998.” Tolerance to herbicide allows the crop plant to grow with much less competition, and plants that produce their own pesticide will naturally result in a much healthier plant, as it has not been preyed upon by caterpillars.  

In particular, Bt crops have been hailed for their positive attributes.   Bt naturally breaks down in the environment, and has been approved by both the EPA and the USDA.   It has not been shown to have any ill effects on mammals or other animals other than the target pest.   Indeed, this is one of the very attributes that makes Bt so attractive.   The very nature of the crystal form is almost exclusively harmful to caterpillars, which are the major pests of a great many crops.

Concerns of Genetic Modification

            Despite the benefits that GM crops confer on us, a great many concerns exist that must be considered regarding this issue.   While few would doubt the benefit of such a product as Golden Rice, when looking into the idea of increased nutrition a bit further, some problems arise.   One example of this is allergies.   In an effort to increase the protein content of the soy fed to meat-producing animals, the DuPont Company engineered an amino acid from the brazil nut into their soybeans.   However many people have allergies to brazil nuts, and studies have shown that this particular amino acid could cause these allergies to ignite from the soy products ( Smith , 2003, pp. 161-162).   This could be a source of concern for a great number of individuals suffering from allergies of some kind or another.   It can be difficult enough simply trying to exclude peanuts, for example, from one’s diet.   With the initiation of GM crops, and widespread gene transfer, it may turn out that a gene shows up in a completely unrelated food, a scary proposition indeed.   “More worrisome is that current GM foods get their genes from bacteria, viruses, and other organisms.   No one knows if humans are allergic to their proteins- they were never before part of the human food supply” ( Smith , 2003, p. 163).   While it is true that bacteria is ubiquitous, ingesting a few bacteria on an apple is quite different than eating an entire ear of corn with bacterial proteins in every bite. We’ve known about the foods we’ve been eating for a long time now, but that may change as foods begin to include a range of genes previously not their own.

            One major concern with Bt crops is that of insect resistance.   Natural selection and evolution have for centuries bred organisms that are adaptable and have good survival skills.   Even with new checks such as Bt crops, eventually insects will naturally develop resistances.   Once this happens, all the work put into GM will have gone to waste, and may cause widespread difficulties with lowered crop yields, possibly creating shortages of food for feed animals and humans alike.   One answer to this problem is the idea of a refuge. The EPA now requires that any farmer planting Bt corn must plant at least twenty percent of their fields with normal corn.   The logic behind this idea is that very few insects will mutate and survive with the Bt resistant gene.   In the refuge, however, a great many of the pests will survive.   When the two groups intermingle, the larger pool of intolerant genes will mask those of the resistant ( Chein , n.d .).  

While this idea is good in theory, and may even be helpful in practice, there exist problems within it as well. The major concerns are that the frequency of resistant alleles are much greater than expected, thereby not allowing the ‘masking’ that is hoped for.   The genetics of insect resistance are not completely understood, and there is evidence showing that the resistance gene may be co-dominant rather than recessive.   This would lead to problems, as the resistance would not in fact be covered up with the refuge insects, but instead be sustained. Finally, a logistical problem exists in that resistant insects may emerge several days after the refuge insects, thereby preventing mating, and maintaining a pure strain of resistant insects ( Fuller , 2004).   If these problems begin to present themselves, then we will shortly have widespread trouble with our widespread Bt crops.   Evolution is a constant battle of predator and prey, and to think that we have suddenly developed a catch-all-end-all solution against the pests is simply ignorant.   A responsive mutation will certainly occur, and when it does, it will be a problem we must address.

             One of the biggest problems with GM crops is encompassed in a single phrase: ecological risks.   Ecosystems are fragile things, and with the spread of civilization we have introduced new organisms into environments that did not hold them previously. One example of this is the kudzu vine.   This is a plant imported from China and Japan brought to the U.S. as an ornamental shade plant.   It was later used in erosion control, but has since gone wild, and has literally covered seven million acres in the southern U.S. states ( Bowring , 2003, p. 56).  

This vine has no predators, and thereby no checks, in the North American ecosystem, allowing it to run rampant.    Yet what is proposed with GM crops is roughly the same.   Add new features and traits to crops, and then grow them in uncontrolled conditions (outside the laboratory); namely fields.   Who can say what ecosystemic interactions might take place?   If we cannot predict how a non-modified plant will act, how can we predict how a GM plant will act? The answer is simply that we can’t.  

One example of GM plants affecting the ecosystem in is the Monarch butterfly scare. One study showed that Bt corn pollen significantly harmed butterfly larvae when dusted on their normal feeding plant, milkweed.   Since monarchs and pest moths are in the same order of insects, naturally the pesticide will affect monarchs as well, though they do not represent the target species.   While this pesticide was used previously, it was sprayed only a few times over several years. With GM, however, it is present constantly, and in much higher volumes, providing the basis of the scare. Thankfully, most butterflies do not feed in areas near cornfields, and new Bt strains have been developed that are less harmful to Monarchs ( Fuller , 2004).   This is a good example of an unexpected result of GM crops, and points our attention to this important issue.   How ecologically responsible is it to release these ‘untested’ natural variants on the world, considering our severe lack of understanding of the consequences?

One worrisome effect of GMO’s is the idea of the super weed.   Our attempts to modify organisms are generally to give them positive traits not found naturally.   But what happens if these traits suddenly pop up in species we don’t want them in? Many of our modern crop species have close cousins that are considered weeds. If the tolerance gene is cross pollinated to a weed, suddenly our Ht crops are useless, and we have a weed that exhibits all the characteristics we wanted to see only in the crop.   What good can come from a weed that is more productive, more resistant to pests and herbicides and is generally more resilient? Despite the fact that this is clearly not a goal of ours, and despite the fact that we see it happening ( Schmeiser , 2005), we continue in this pursuit.

Compounding this issue is the imprecision with which genetic modification is accomplished.   With the gene gun vector, for instance, scientists cannot control where the gold particles end up, and cannot predict with any certainty where the DNA has been inserted.   Only a simple preliminary indicator tests gives any clues to what DNA has been accepted.   Bowring (2003, p. 42) states that “when an altered DNA molecule is introduced into the genome of a living organism, the full range of its effects on the functioning of that organism cannot be controlled or predicted.”   Such concerns as plieotropy (a single protein may serve several biological functions), silencing of genes, or other unexpected interactions within the organism are all frightening.   Hopefully laboratory experiments catch most of the dramatic changes in GM plants, but who knows what has already been released with unknown mutations that very well may affect our ecosystem?

            As has been explored, the area of GM plants and crops is not a simple issue. It calls up a multitude of arguments, and is clearly not black or white, but some elusive shade of grey.   Many of the possibilities of GM are extremely enticing, and seem to offer great potential to many of the agricultural problems we have today.   It appears that on a conceptual level, the marvels of GM are quite impressive indeed. What seems to be the case, however, is that when actually implemented, there is a staggering amount of possibilities that could end up occurring, many of them negative.   When taking the ideas out of the laboratory, many other unexpected results may surface.   Golden Rice may be a great idea, but what allergies may be hiding within the grains? Bt corn may lessen pesticides, but what effect does it have on the food chain and ecosystem it supports?  

            Percy Schmeiser is an organic farmer from Canada who became involved in a lawsuit with Monsanto, a GM crop producer.   One of the biggest concerns he has is that with GMO’s, there is no such thing as coexistence. ( Schmeiser , 2005). Once an organism (such as those engineered in GM) has been released upon the world, you cannot contain it. There is no way to bring it back under control, and there is no telling what effects it may go on to have. Is this really something we wish to do to ourselves? We have only one earth to use. Have we not learned our lesson with the biological control disasters we have seen over and over again? Is it wise to introduce an untested organism into a poorly understood ecosystem?

            It is precisely these questions that are the greatest concern with GM crops.   The unexpected interactions within our environment are not a price we should be willing to pay.   We have enough on our plate already, and to add more fuel to the fire by releasing GM plants in our world is simply irresponsible.   Although genetically modified crops give a wide variety of benefits, the concerns associated with them, and particularly the unknown risks, are not worth the price we would have to pay.

Bowring, F . (2003).   Science, Seeds, and Cyborgs . New York , NY : Verso.

Chien , K . (no date). Bacillus thuringiensis . Retrieved October 3, 2005 , from the University of San Diego California web site:   http://www.bt.ucsd.edu/index.html

Corcos , A and Monaghan, F. (1993). Gregor Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybrids . New Brunswick , NJ : Rutgers University Press

Corn and Its Untamed Cousins : Wild Genes in Domestic Crops. (2005). Understanding Evolution. Retrieved Oct 3 rd 2005 , from the University of California Museum of Paleontology website: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/relevance/IIBcorn.shtml

Fowler, M, Scott, N and Slater, A. (2003). Plant Biotechnology . Oxford , NY : Oxford University Press

Fuller , L. (2004). Transgenic Crops: An Introduction and Resource Guide . Retrieved October 3, 2005 , from Colorado State University web site: http://www.colostate.edu/programs/lifesciences/TransgenicCrops/index.html

Genetic Engineering . (2005). Wikipedia. Retrieved October 3 rd , from the Wikipedia website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_engineering

Nottingham , S. (2003). Eat your genes . New York , NY : Zed Books Ltd.

Rader , Charles. (2003). A Report on Genetically Engineered Crops. Retrieved October 3 rd , 2005 from website: http://members.tripod.com/c_rader0/gemod.htm

Schmeiser , Percy. (November 8 th , 2005). Lecture on GMO’s and the Monsanto Corporation.

Sengbusch , Peter (2003). Genetic Engineering . Retrieved October 7 th 2005 , from the University of Hamburg Faculty of Biology website: http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e34/34a.htm

Smith , J. (2003). Seeds of Deception . Fairfield, IA: Yes! Books.

Walden , R. (1989). Genetic Transformation in Plants . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall

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• v.13(1); 2022

The state of the ‘GMO’ debate - toward an increasingly favorable and less polarized media conversation on ag-biotech?

Sarah evanega.

a The Alliance for Science, the Boyce Thompson Institute, Ithaca, New York, USA

Joan Conrow

Jordan adams.

b Cision Global Insights, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Although nearly three decades have passed since genetically modified crops (so-called ‘GMOs’) were widely commercialized, vociferous debate remains about the use of biotechnology in agriculture, despite a worldwide scientific consensus on their safety and utility. This study analyzes the volume and tenor of the GMO conversation as it played out on social and traditional media between 2018 and 2020, looking at 103,084 online and print articles published in English-language media around the world as well as 1,716,071 social media posts. To our knowledge, our analysis is the first comprehensive survey of the shifting traditional and online media discourse on this issue during this time period. While the volume of traditional media coverage of GMOs increased significantly during the period, this was combined with a dramatic drop in the volume of social media posts of over 80%. Traditional media tended to be somewhat more positive in their coverage than social media in 2018 and 2019, but that gap disappeared in 2020. Both traditional and social media saw trends toward increasing favorability, with the positive trend especially robust in social media. The large decline in volume of social media posts, combined with a strong trend toward greater favorability, may indicate a drop in the salience of the GMO debate among the wider population even while the volume of coverage in traditional media increased. Overall, our results suggest that both social and traditional media may be moving toward a more favorable and less polarized conversation on ag-biotech overall.

Introduction

Major international and national expert institutions and academies accept the scientific consensus that food produced from genetically modified (GM) crops is as safe as any other, and that no specific safety risks or health concerns can be attributed to consumption of so-called GMOs. 1 , 2 However, public opinion across the world has been markedly skeptical of GMOs since they were first introduced into the food supply in 1994. Some of the most frequently cited concerns are fears about food safety, corporate control of seeds and the food supply, potential pesticide use associated with the crops, and the welfare of smallholder farmers.

In China, for example, a survey carried out in 2016 found that 47% of people held a negative view of GMOs, with nearly 14% believing that “GM technology was a form of bioterrorism targeted at China.” 3 In Kenya, where the government initiated a ban on GM imports in 2013 but has recently permitted farmers to begin growing GM cotton, about a third of those polled held a negative opinion of GMOs as long ago as 2003. 4 In some European countries, opposition to GMOs can be particularly high: in Poland, a 2016 survey found that over 60% of respondents opposed the production and distribution of GM foods in the country. 5

This public suspicion is not shared by most scientists. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in the United States in 2015 detected a wider gap between scientists and the public on attitudes toward GMOs than any other area of science-related controversy, including vaccines, nuclear power, and pesticides. Specifically, only 37% of the general public thought that GM foods were safe to eat, compared to 88% of AAAS scientists. 6 Pew also found in 2016 that the US public was almost entirely unaware of the high level of consensus on GMO safety that exists in the scientific community, with only 14% of people concurring that “almost all of scientists agree that GM foods are safe to eat.” 7

Newer studies indicate more favorable public sentiment toward GM products. These include a study by the European Food Safety Authority that saw the percentage of Europeans choosing GMOs as a food safety concern drop from 66% in 2010 to just 27% in 2019 8 and an October 2019 Pew poll that found a majority of Americans surveyed believe it is likely that GM crops will increase the global food supply and result in more affordable food prices. 9

This study seeks to evaluate the volume, reach, and sentiment of the social and traditional media conversation around GMOs over a three-year period between January 2018 and December 2020. It aims to shed light on such questions as how media coverage may influence public perceptions, whether media share scientific perceptions around GMOs, how traditional and social media cover the issue, the influence of certain companies in affecting the tone of the conversation, the role of bots and cyborgs in the conversation, how the volume of coverage has shifted, and attitudes toward emerging tools in agricultural biotechnology.

Source data was gathered by Cision Media Insights, which combined 200 pre-defined top tier English-language media and 75,000 online media with social media to analyze trends in the GMO debate globally. Based on media availability, content is sourced via an in-house clipping service, automated feeds based on keywords (third-party API), manual searches for online content behind paywalls and database-sourced print media. Social media coverage includes English-language Twitter feeds and public Facebook pages. Content was captured using relevant keywords (See Supplementary Information for a list of top-tier media and keywords).

This content was subjected to automated computer analysis in real time, using Cision’s natural language processing and custom dictionaries, including a black/white list to help eliminate irrelevant content. Human analysis was included for relevance and sentiment validation of 10,800 top-tier English language articles and 54,000 social media posts, with analysis of the remainder being automated. In total 103,084 traditional media articles covering GMOs were analyzed, alongside 1,716,071 pieces of social media content.

For sentiment analysis, content was assigned a ‘positive’ tag if the statement generally would likely leave the reader feeling more positive about the corporations, individuals, or issues mentioned or if the journalist took a positive stance. A ‘negative’ tag was assigned if a statement would leave the reader likely feeling more critical or if the journalist took a negative stance. Factual explanations of the benefits of biotechnology would count as ‘positive,’ for example, while critiques would count as ‘negative.’ A neutral statement would express no position and the reader would likely not be swayed in any direction. The overall favorability value combines ‘positive’ and ‘neutral’ sentiment into a single value. We also use the ‘mixed’ or ‘ambivalent’ sentiment designation for lines of text that contain a positive and negative element. For an example, a statement such as “while studies have shown that GMO foods are safe to eat, or even safer than organic foods, their relationship to pesticides is a dangerous concern.” Full details of the Cision sentiment analysis method are given in Supplementary Information.

We use the term ‘gross reach’ to indicate the total potential audience of a media item, meaning the number of people who might have had the opportunity to see an original article or social media post, including reposts, replies, and retweets/shares of a social post. For print this includes the number of printed copies of a publication multiplied by the average number of readers per copy. For online this includes monthly page impressions of the URL of the given outlet (including sub-page impressions separately where possible) divided by the average number of published articles for that outlet. These readership and page impression counts for print and online are provided by third parties such as Nielsen. For social media, reach is based on the number of followers of the social media account.

As Fig. 1 shows, the volume of coverage of the GMO issue more than tripled in the time period we studied, from January 2018 (1320 articles) to December 2020 (4502 articles).

Volume of agricultural biotechnology GMO conversation in traditional media 2018–2020, showing the number of stories published.

The volume of social media interactions in the GMO conversation moved in the opposite direction however, showing a large decline between 2018 and 2020, falling from nearly 1.2 million to just under 200,000 in that time period, a decline of 82% ( Fig. 2 ).

Volume of agricultural biotechnology social media interactions media 2018–2020.

The overall tone of the traditional and social media GMO conversation during the 2018 to 2020 period is generally favorable ( Fig. 3 ). Favorability is defined as ‘positive’ and ‘neutral’ coverage as a percentage of the overall coverage, including ‘negative’ and ‘ambivalent’ coverage (see Methods). It is notable that the data are relatively noisy with high variance between the months in our sequence, ranging from a low of 47% in April 2019 to a high of 90% in April 2020. Overall favorability has increased somewhat over the three-year period, although the noisy data and relatively low R-squared value indicate low confidence in the robustness of this trend.

Sentiment analysis showing the favorability of the GMO conversation across all media (social and traditional combined) over a three-year period from Jan 2018 to Dec 2020.

The sentiment breakdown of the conversation on traditional and social media (combined) for the period of the study is depicted in Fig. 4 . The data for Fig. 4 are the same as Fig. 3 , with sentiment broken out into ‘negative,’ ‘positive,’ ‘ambivalent’ and ‘neutral’ categories rather than combined into a single overall favorability number for each month.

A monthly breakdown of sentiment across all media for the period Jan 2018 to Dec 2020.

While Figs. 3 and 4 look at the favorability of all media with traditional and social combined, Figs. 5 and 6 deal with the sentiment of traditional and social media separately. The sentiment of the traditional media conversation around GMOs was slightly more positive than that of social media during the study period, averaging 75% favorable if neutral and overtly positive reporting are combined ( Fig. 5 ) as compared with 67% favorability in social media ( Fig. 6 ). Average monthly values as high as 96% favorable are found in traditional media, while throughout the whole period favorability never dropped below 50% ( Fig. 5 ). However, as with the overall GMO conversation depicted in Figs. 3 and 5 shows noisy data with little confidence in the overall trend, with an R-squared value of 0.0479.

Traditional media sentiment analysis for the GMO conversation.

Social media sentiment analysis for the GMO conversation.

While sentiment toward GMOs in social media was substantially more variable than in traditional media, monthly values averaged in the 36-month time frame of the study show a strong long-term trend toward more positive social media coverage. While there were months in 2018 and 2019 when the favorability rating dropped to lows of 26% and 33%, it never dropped below 57% in 2020 ( Fig. 5 ). Figure 5 appears to show a more robust linear trend toward greater favorability in social media than traditional media, with an R-squared value of 0.2125 accounting for 21% of the variance by time.

Figure 7 shows annual averages of sentiment, broken into ‘positive,’ ‘negative,’ ‘neutral’ and ‘mixed’ categories for each year. As indicated above, one feature for 2018 and 2019 seems to be a substantially more negative sentiment seen in social media, although the two were almost equal in 2020.

Average sentiment per year across traditional media and social media for 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Figure 8 shows the key metrics for the GMO conversation. In terms of volume of content, there was an increase from 2018 to 2020, with 20,300 traditional media stories covering GMOs in 2018 ( Fig. 8a ) rising to 34,000 in 2019 ( Fig. 8b ) and 48,600 stories in 2020 ( Fig. 8c ). When assessed in terms of gross reach, the increase was from 1.8 billion to 3.7 billion over the same time period. There was a sharp downward trend in the visibility of the GMO issue on social media, however, from 1.2 million social posts in 2018 to 197,000 in 2020. This may suggest that despite an increase in ongoing traditional media coverage there is less salience in the GMO debate in the wider population as indicated in the sharp decline in the volume of social media posts, particularly when combined with the strong trend toward increased social media favorability seen in Fig. 6 .

Key metrics for the GMO conversation in 2018 (a), 2019 (b) and 2020 (c), showing volume, gross reach and sentiment breakdown.

The Monsanto/Bayer Effect

Monsanto (now part of Bayer) and its association with pesticides, notably glyphosate, appears to strongly drive negative perceptions toward GMOs. Coverage of Monsanto/Bayer in both traditional and social media was consistently and considerably more negative than coverage of GMOs overall. In some months almost the entirety of the social media conversation took a negative tone, such as April 2019 and November 2020, with only 1% favorability. ( Fig. 9 ).

The favorability of the coverage of Monsanto/Bayer over the three-year period in traditional (blue) and social (green) media.

As with the general GMO issue, traditional media coverage of Monsanto/Bayer was substantially more favorable than social, reaching highs of 100% on occasion. About a quarter of the overall GMO debate involved mentions of glyphosate as an issue, whereas a third to nearly half of traditional media coverage of GMOs involved Monsanto/Bayer. References to glyphosate in social media declined by 3% over that period, while the figure is 4% for traditional media (Figure not shown).

Influence of Twitter Bots and Cyborgs

Bot accounts represented 10% of Twitter users engaged in GMO discussions between 2018 and 2020 and contributed 10% of overall tweet volume. Bot accounts had much lower salience than human-operated accounts, contributing only 1% of gross reach. However, three out of the top ten Twitter accounts for volume of GMO content in 2019 were at least partially automated (listed as “undetermined” in Botometer scores) and so may appear to have influence due to the sheer volume of coverage (not shown). These cyborg accounts (human accounts that use automated posting for a large proportion of their content) were about 20% of overall accounts and were substantially more influential than bots. Combined, this suggests that about a third of users engaged in the GMO debate were cyborgs and bots. In addition, bots and cyborgs were substantially more negative in sentiment toward GMOs than human accounts. ( Fig. 10 )

Role of Bots in GMO coverage 2018–2020.

GMOs in Africa and South Asia

The GMO conversation was different in Africa and South Asia than in the United States, which dominated in terms of overall volume and gross reach. The gross reach for the 2018 GMO conversation in the US was 3.6 billion, compared to 116 million in Kenya and 113 million in the Philippines, the two next largest geographies. It was just 2.6 million in Bangladesh (data not shown).

In terms of sentiment analysis, though the conversation was generally favorable in all countries, it was more favorable in the US, with the Philippines registering the highest percentage of negative coverage ( Fig. 11 ).

Sentiment analysis of GMO coverage (traditional and social media) in six geographies from 2018–2020.

In 2019, the average favorability increased over 2018, though there was a decline in some geographies in 2020. In the US and Kenya, the favorability remained relatively stable across the three years, whereas it dropped in Uganda and Bangladesh over time. In Nigeria and the Philippines, the favorability was greatest in 2019 ( Fig. 12 ).

Favorability trends in six geographies.

Although there has been substantial academic attention given to the course of the biotechnology debate in the media, previous assessments have typically been based on small data samples analyzed by hand, including at most a few hundred articles. We believe this analysis to be the first that attempts to portray a rough aggregate picture of the whole debate in the English language over a broad time period, using machine-learning tools to assess many thousands of articles with a potential reach of billions of combined views. To our knowledge it is also the first to include social media in this analysis and compare it w ith trends in traditional media over several years.

Previous studies have analyzed news reporting on GMOs, though often only for a small snapshot of time and without a comprehensive evaluation of media coverage. A 2010 paper, for example, analyzed six UK newspapers for the first three months of 2004, finding that scientists at the time were presented simply as one competing interest group with no special claim to truth. 10 A study of Kenyan and international newspapers carrying biotechnology-related stories between 2010 and 2014 found that the publication of the 2012 Seralini study significantly increased the risk messaging in Kenyan reporting on the subject. 11 Stephen Morse conducted an analysis of global newspaper reporting on genetically modified crops between 1996 and 2013, finding – perhaps surprisingly – mildly positive coverage during the period. 12 Another long-term study, published more recently, looked at the Swedish GMO debate between 1994 and 2017. 13 In volume terms, the number of articles rose to a broad peak in 2003–05, falling gradually until 2017. The researchers also found a clear trend from negative to positive during the period. Leonie Marks and colleagues, in a 2007 analysis of UK and US traditional media, found that coverage of biotechnology was markedly more positive for medical than agricultural applications. 14

This type of analysis could be useful because high levels of skepticism about GM crops may be related to media coverage on the issue, which would thereby play an important role in shaping public opinion. In China, for instance, attitudes turned sharply negative following a 2012 scandal about a nutrition study involving genetically modified rice and Chinese children, which was brought to the fore by Greenpeace and widely reported with a narrative suggesting that genetically modified crops are instruments of Western control and imperialism. 15 Prior to that, Chinese newspaper attitudes had been either positive or neutral toward GMOs. 16 Media framing has also been strongly associated with a trend toward more negative public attitudes to GMOs in Russia in the years leading up to a ban imposed in 2016. 17 These are not all recent trends: one study found that in Hungary, media framing of the GM issue largely favored the ‘anti’ side between 2007 and 2009. 18

Media coverage of GMO issues does not arise in a vacuum. Instead, it reflects political, ideological, and economic contests in societies. In some cases, as in China, geopolitical anxieties can drive widespread public belief in conspiracy theories about Western aggression via genetic technologies. The Russian government, which is often accused of waging an information warfare campaign against the West, has also promoted fears and conspiracy theories about GMOs. A 2018 study found that the Russian state news networks RT and Sputnik produced many more articles on GMOs than Western media outlets, most of which were sharply negative. 19 Some of these Russian-promoted stories featured conspiracy theories that were unlikely to gain exposure in conventional news, such as one headline in 2016: “GMO mosquitoes could be cause of Zika outbreak, critics say.” 20

Negative coverage may also originate from groups ideologically opposed to genetic engineering, or NGOs that seek to raise campaign funds by spreading misinformation. This latter strategy has been termed the ‘monetization of disinformation’ and may raise millions of dollars per year for groups that employ this strategy as a fundraising tool. A recent study analyzing 95,000 online articles found that those receiving the most attention appeared not in conventional media but were published by “a small group of alternative health and pro-conspiracy sites.” 21

Much of the controversy now takes place in the social media sphere, where trolls and bots can increase polarization and spread misinformation exponentially. A 2018 study of the vaccine issue found that trolls and bots often supported both sides in order to amplify controversy and create “false equivalency, eroding public consensus on vaccination.” 22

Our analysis suggests that traditional media coverage of GMOs is consistently and substantially more neutral or positive than public perceptions as reported from polling data. This finding is in keeping with the media’s traditional role of aiming for neutral or impartial coverage. Because monthly favorability ratings rise and fall as different stories break, there is only a weak long-term trend toward more favorable coverage in traditional media seen in our data.

The situation is somewhat different on social media. In social media, extreme or one-sided positions can pass unchallenged and strong statements, regardless of whether they are true or false, tend to be ‘liked’ or shared more often. Yet even in this ‘free for all’ environment, monthly values averaged in the 36-month time frame of the study show a robust long-term trend toward more positive social media coverage.

In volume terms, there was a significant increase from 2018 to 2020 in traditional media coverage of the GMO issue. There was a sharp downward trend in the volume of GMO-related posts on social media, however. This suggests that the GMO issue is perhaps becoming somewhat less salient over time in terms of public engagement. This decline could however also be due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have occupied the attention of social media users during 2020. It also suggests that while traditional media coverage of the issue is typically driven by events happening in the news cycle, social media commentators are less driven by mainstream news coverage of the issue. It is notable that traditional and social media visibility peaks do not tend to occur at the same time, suggesting that the debates operate somewhat independently of each other.

A familiar factor in the GMO conversation is the antipathy directed specifically toward Monsanto, with the company becoming a bogeyman for anti-GMO activists and its flagship ‘RoundupReady’ crops coming to symbolize overall objections to the technology. Though Monsanto has since been purchased by Bayer and its name retired, the stigma seems to remain. We found that coverage of Monsanto/Bayer in both traditional and social media is consistently and considerably more negative than coverage of GMOs overall. This likely reflects ongoing negative portrayals of the company regarding pesticides and issues of corporate control of seeds, and thus food. In some months over the two-year period of January 2018 through December 2019, almost the entirety of the social media conversation took a negative tone, though favorable spikes were also recorded both years. The fact that the Monsanto/Bayer conversation was substantially more negative in terms of social media sentiment analysis than other areas helps validate our methods, as it confirms what might be expected given our broader understanding of the debate.

Geographically, the United States dominates the GMO conversation, both in terms of volume and reach. This may be because the technology is widely employed in US agriculture, which also has a robust presence in traditional and social media. The conversation is generally favorable in the US, Africa, and South Asia, though it remains divided in the Philippines, where GM corn has been adopted but international controversies remain over the recent adoption of GM Golden Rice. In Africa, the conversation is most negative in Uganda. These differences may be due to the fact that Nigeria and Kenya have recently adopted GM crops, with farmers and media seeing the positive results of field trials, while Uganda still lacks a biosafety law that would permit introduction of GM crops.

Our analysis shows that traditional media tended to be somewhat more positive in their coverage than social media in 2018 and 2019, though that gap disappeared in 2020. While the volume of traditional media coverage of GMOs increased significantly during the period, this was combined with a dramatic drop in the volume of social media posts. Both traditional and social media saw trends toward increasing favorability, with the positive trend especially robust in social media.

Notably, the same positive favorability was observed in Africa, where countries are just beginning to adopt the technology. The favorable conversation in Kenya and Nigeria may be due to the fact that farmers have been able to witness field trials as well as plant GM seeds on their own farms. It may also be that anti-GMO activists lessen their activities in countries where the technology has been adopted, either turning to other issues or devoting their attention to countries that are still undecided.

Our analysis also found that cyborgs and bots represent about a third of the users engaged in the GMO social media debate. Furthermore, their posts are substantially more negative in sentiment toward GMOs than human accounts. This suggests that cyborgs and bots may be intentionally used by nefarious actors to sow dissent and make the GMO conversation appear more negative and polarized than it is.

The decline in volume of social media posts combined with a strong trend toward greater favorability may indicate a drop in the salience of the GMO debate among the wider population, even while the volume of coverage in traditional media increased. Overall, our results suggest that both social and traditional media may be moving toward a more favorable and less polarized conversation on ag biotech overall.

Despite these encouraging results, it is clear that the scientific community still faces major communications challenges in addressing gaps between traditional and social media debates and the actual scientific consensus around the safety and desirability of agricultural biotechnology. Although the situation appears to be improving, there is no guarantee that this will continue as the influence of negative sentiments and actors continues to weigh on the debate and skew public perceptions away from perspectives that are based on genuine scientific evidence.

Funding Statement

The Cornell Alliance for Science is funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A list of other donors can be found at https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/about/funders/. Cision, Inc. is a company that performs media analysis and provides other communication services for paying clients across a variety of sectors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This study contains the authors’ objective analysis and may not reflect the views or attitudes of Cision or Cision’s clients. No other competing interests are declared by the authors.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

GMO’s: Safe or Harmful?

This essay will delve into the debate over the safety of GMOs. It will examine the scientific evidence regarding their health and environmental impacts and discuss the differing perspectives of scientists, policymakers, and the public. You can also find more related free essay samples at PapersOwl about Agriculture.

How it works

Ever since the first signs of agriculture, there have been new developments in every generation. The world’s population and demand for food is progressively growing getting larger as every day, as well as the demand for food, and whereas, the land that is used for agricultureal production is diminishing not getting any larger. Crop scientists are working hard every day to find a way to multiply farmers’ yields and to do it in a safe and healthy way. Many crop enthusiasts have discovered ways to genetically modify crops, to not only make the harvest more plentiful, but make the produce more healthy healthier when taken to the market; however, the problems for these genetic geniuses do not lie within the plants or breeding them into a better option, yet the general public has become more skeptical of the advances in agricultural sciences.

This is the most common problem with producer and consumer in today’s world, although essentially nothing pertaining to GMOs are harmful. People are just unsure of what is being done to make the amount and quality of food elevate, and tend to make assumptions without educating themselves. Therefore, people must do research and make sure they know more about the topic and spread the facts with others to ensure that America’s food can continue to be clean and more plentiful.

Taking this further, I have gathered an abundance of information and read into why people seem to be frightened of genetically modified crops. As said previously, GMOs were not created to harm the people of the world. The human population is skyrocketing as we speak, therefore the amount of food needed to feed the world yearly will progressively get larger and larger. As technology advances in the modern world, we can utilize that technology to make our lives better. That is what crop scientist do when it comes to breeding certain crops to produce not only the healthiest crop for the people, but the most lucrative crop for the farmer’s operation as well. The most frequently asked question among the general public is, are GMOs safe in nearly all cases, GMOs make food safer for human consumption, for they lessen the amount of pesticides used on crops. As Natalie Regis states in the Biotechnology Revolution Genetically Modified Crops and Food, The use of engineered crops has reduced the need for application of wide-spectrum insecticides in many areas growing plants, such as potatoes, cotton, and corn, that were endowed with a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensus, which produces a natural insecticide called Bt toxin. (pg 113-115). Therefore, genetically modifying the crops to where they can naturally be resistant to certain insects heavily reduces the amount of chemicals and insecticides used on crops throughout the world; and in time make the food we consume healthier. And with the lessened use of chemicals and sprays on crops, the citizens all over the world will be less hesitant to consume certain food.

Although, the simple fact is, to solve the conflict of skeptical people versus GMOs we must get down to the root of the problem and figure out what started the hesitation to consume the genetically modified crops. As the earth ages and science becomes progressively more advanced there will be numerous technological changes in our world. For example, during world war II the scientists working on the Manhattan Project were also skeptical of the advances in science being used to save the world from the Naizi regime. Ironically, majority of the time there is no logical reason to be scared of advancements in technology. When people get ahold of information they tend to spread it and the words get twisted and it can come back a completely different story. But, the main reason for opposition to GMOs is dishonest reviews and uneducated people informing others and misinforming them therefore making their claim seem more powerful. After analyzing the book, Opposing viewpoints Corporate farming and reading through the chapter pertaining to dishonest activists and anti GMO groups there seemed to be a pattern. Although the articles written by those opposing GMOs seem to be informative and accurate, when examined more closely None of these studies prove or even persuasively suggests that GMOs can be harmful to human health. The majority are either obviously flawed or are not scientific studies. as Layla Kaitree states (p. 166). As I read further I begin to see where Kaitree can make this statement. One thing I found extremely crucial in one of the articles is that the article was published by a very patchy source. As Kaitree explains, The claims were printed in a pay-for-play journal (also known as predatory journal), meaning that for a fee one can get nearly anything published. There have been several exposes on pay-for-play journals, and many scientists believe that the phenomenon is eroding the quality of science. (p. 172)

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Arguments against GMOs

By Mary Odum , originally published by A Prosperous Way Down

May 22, 2015

I recently decided to take an epidemiology course to fill in gaps in my knowledge base. The entire online graduate certificate in Environmental Health looked interesting, so I applied for the entire certificate. Environmental Health was the first course that I took online at this flagship Florida university. The online experience would be a separate post in itself — the online course was mechanically flawless but grossly deficient in interactions and building critical thinking skills.

One of my class assignments was to argue in a paper against Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Since the course and the textbook were too reductionist for my tastes, I argued using macroscopic arguments. I doubt the teaching assistants read it–like all other assignments in this MOOC , it received a grade with no comments. Various friends are asking me what I think of GMOs, and most students in the class and most of my friends think that GMOs are a great solution for our food problems, so I am reposting the paper here.

Corporations promote GMOs as the solution to world hunger through expanded global food sources. That hopeful argument is not based on evidence, and there are many arguments against widespread GMO use. Most science and policy arguments are reductionist. But Einstein said that we cannot solve problems from the same consciousness that created the problems. We must learn to see the world anew, from a larger scale to see a complete picture of the processes involved. Reductionist science is not the answer to the problems engendered by a finite biosphere with a human population in overshoot. Therefore, the arguments presented here address macroscopic arguments against GMOS, including the impact of peak oil production on the current developed countries’ system of industrial agriculture, the rapidly expanding pesticide treadmill that accompanies GMOs, replacement of natural biodiversity, water and soil loss or degradation, and expanding corporate domination, with increasing social inequity, loss of small farmers, monopolization and unsustainability of our food system, and the potential link between gut health and inadequately studied GMOs.

Feed the hungry or “cows and cars?”

High transformity agriculture

The most systemic argument against GMOs is the energy-intensive nature of high-tech agriculture that requires the extraction of profit, not letting Nature do the work through traditional diversity and seeds. Energy/emergy intensity of agriculture has increased many fold during the past century of agricultural industrialization (Rydberg and Hayden, 2006). Global energy production has plateaued and is forecast to decline, with a large discrepancy in available fossil fuels to support our current developed society (US-EIA, 2013) . The Middle East retains about 2/3 of all proven reserves of oil, while the United States oil production peaked in 1970 (BP Statistical Review, 2014) . These facts do not bode well for the sustainability of industrial agriculture, which has evolved to rely heavily on natural gas and fossil fuel subsidies for fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, over-sized tillers and harvesters, and now tech-intensive GMOs that are necessary to stay ahead of plant blights that impact monoculture farms. The research, marketing, law, and other complex necessities of high-tech agriculture each demand more emergy from society, which takes resources from other needed societal supports. Renewable energy sources have less net energy, so renewables are unable to sustain industrial society in the place of non-renewable liquid fuels (Day et al., 2009) . GMOs make us less sustainable, as they make our food system increasingly dependent on fossil fuel inputs and increasingly centralized and high-tech.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/adoption-of-genetically-engineered-crops-in-the-us/recent-trends-in-ge-adoption.aspx

The pesticide treadmill

Tilman et al., 2002

The second controversial argument against GMOs relates to environmental health and the accumulation of increasing volumes of pesticides in the environment as a result of the pesticides treadmill. Annual proprietary seeds that demand concurrent use of changing, untested and expanding mixes of both fertilizer and proprietary pesticides leads to a pesticide treadmill (Tilman, 2002) . The evidence on how much pesticide use is increasing globally varies greatly by report, ranging from a sympathetic meta-analysis report of a reduction in pesticide use by 37% over the past 20 years (Klumper & Qaim, 2014) , to an increase of 7% over that same general period (Benbrook, 2012 ).

The information on global pesticide production is proprietary and not widely touted, but the evidence is visible in healthy, growing corporate profits . Corporate pressure may influence scientific reports through funding and publication bias. Pesticide-resistant super weeds develop, old patents expire, and new GMO seeds are repeatedly developed for new crop categories in hopes of expanding corporate markets and profits, leading to increased costs for farmers and increasing damage to the environment. What is the relevant endpoint if corporate survival mandates ever-increasing growth of herbicides, which kill plants, insects, and birds in the environment? The loss of creatures who eat crop-eating insects leads to the need for more pesticides, and around we go again.

http://www.stephaniemcmillan.org/codegreen/

Monocultures replacing natural biodiversity

How much is too much pesticide for the planet as a whole, given the additive toxicity of many pesticides and non-food uses? The third large-scale argument against GMOs is the loss of biodiversity, water, and soil nutrients/erosion, through expansion of pesticides, replacement of natural systems with industrial-scale agriculture, and over-fertilization and irrigation. Replacing natural biodiversity and insects with insect-free monocultures hastens the demise of our environmental support systems that we cannot live without—witness dead zones in the ocean, depleting and nitrate-polluted aquifers, and so on. Rockstrom et al. (2009) name biodiversity loss as our greatest problem, and Rhodes’ excellent recent article describing the linkages between the problems of biodiversity and soil loss with bee declines and other problems illustrates this. Additionally, chemical and GMO-based agriculture is fertilizer and water-intensive, adding to ocean dead zones and water shortages, which some claim as the biggest problem of the 21st century. In essence, the idea that we can outsmart Mother Nature and replace her biodiversity with a genetically new agricultural system is arrogant.

Unsustainable corporatization and centralization

Bradford, J. Dec. 21, 2007. Does less energy mean more farmers? The Oil Drum

The fourth large-scale argument addresses expanding corporate domination of seed patents, farm ownership, research, marketing, and so on. Fossil-fuel-based industrial agriculture winnows small farmers and creates a trend towards large-scale production with an inverse correlation between per capital farmers and energy intensity (Bradford, 2007) . Since we are now beginning energetic descent, we will need more small farmers, less intensive methods such as agroecology, and less reliance on technology to become sustainable and avoid collapse of societies. The loss of small farmers adds to social stratification and inequality within the farming industry, but also in society at large, as regulatory capture by corporations leads to weakened regulations, more GMOS, more pesticides, and so on, in an autocatalytic merry-go-round. Feedback loops for policies favorable to corporations beget more large corporations, which expands unsustainable trends into overshoot.

Poorly studied GMOs and health

Benbrook, 2012, Environmental Sciences Europe (Bt Corn in Acres planted and CDC data)

The fifth argument is the question of human health and poorly studied GMOs. The United States in particular places the burden of proof for regulation of hazardous chemicals on the Environmental Protection Agency and citizens to defend environmental health based on the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act . Laws in the last decade in the European Union assume a more precautionary approach by ruling that the proponent of an activity must bear the burden of proof in showing safety. One must wonder whether there is a correlation between the new “disease” of gluten intolerance and the recent rapidly expanding production of GMO foods. We do not know the human health or environmental results of gene manipulation of our food are. A quick search of the literature suggests that there is much research on genetic treatment of diseases, but very little study of the questioned link between human health and GMO-based diets. The only studies so far consist of 90-day rat-feeding trials. A small, longer-term study in 2012 of rat health by Seralini et al. (2014) received great criticism and the journal editors retracted the article. Large corporations can pay for biased research, and can control publication and news media. Who will fund neutral research on GMOs and human health?

What is the energy basis of GMOs?

The claim that GMOs exist to feed the world is a false one, derived from corporations’ desire for profit. This post has raised energetic, ecological, social, and health arguments against GMOs. Other arguments include the unknown, unintended consequences of intentional mutation of the gene pool of our food, and the biased funding and publication of research.

In an era of population overshoot and resource scarcity, being able to fall back on our biosphere’s ecosystem services will be critical for a society that prospers. An industrialized, high-tech food system that requires increasingly complex research, laws, profit-making corporations, and annexation of natural systems into massive fields sowed with machinery, sprayed with poisons, fertilized with fossil fuels, and irrigated with our children’s aquifers while being supported by massive research labs to stave off the next pesticide-resistant insect is not a sustainable model. In my opinion, the only way to avoid collapse of our food system is to return to agroecological systems which show four systemic properties: productivity, stability, sustainability, and equitability.

The land company—that’s the bank when it has land—wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours, it would be good – not mine, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But this tractor does two things – it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people were driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this (Steinbeck, 1939, Chapter 14).

As Steinbeck suggests in The Grapes of Wrath , there may be a point at which technology owns us, and takes us to a place from which we cannot return without revolution of the system. We’re going to need a lot more farmers and less technology in a future with less fossil fuel, and more sustainable and ecologically based agricultural practices. GMOs only move us further towards an unsustainable goal of continued growth for a global economy in overshoot.

Feature image: mdglillehammer /flickr. Creative Commons 2.0. license.

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Should All Genetically Modified Foods Be Labeled?

Introduction, arguments against labeling of genetically modified food, arguments in support of labeling of genetically modified food, works cited.

Genetically modified food has become a controversial topic in the current society. According to Marchant (75), the world has been experiencing changes in weather patterns due to issues of global warming. As a result of this, agriculture has been massively affected. On the other hand, the world population is constantly on the rise.

The number of those who practice agriculture is also decreasing. This is because people move to towns to get employed in large manufacturing companies or the retailers. This means that there is an increased pressure on the farmers to come up with a solution for this challenging situation. According to Sateesh (87), the solution that farmers were looking form came at last with the help of advanced technology.

Genetically modified organisms were proven to be more productive than natural products. Genetically modified plants were more resistant to drought and could produce more than the natural plants. Genetically modified animals took much shorter time to mature, and those that produce milk would be yielding more milk when the breed is genetically modified. This was a breakthrough discovery in the field of agriculture. Farmers were given a solution to the problem of increasing productivity of their crops.

The society welcomed the breakthrough for it was convinced of having a reliable source of food throughout the year at affordable prices. Many members of the society considered this invention as the best way through which the food security would be assured. This was till it was discovered that genetically modified food could have a negative effect on the human being when consumed. According to Weiss (46), genetically modified foods may have an effect on the genetics of a human being.

The effect may not be exhibited immediately. It may take years of regular consumption of genetically modified food for the effect to be seen. In some instances, the effect may be witnessed on the children of the regular consumers of genetically modified food. People consuming this product should, therefore, be aware of these consequences. They should be informed every time they purchase genetically modified food, that the product is not natural.

There has been a strong argument against labeling of the genetically modified foods. There is a section of the society that has come out strongly to oppose any move that would compel manufacturers to label their products. The leading defenders of lack of labeling genetically products are the manufacturers. Manufacturers have come out to reject the clarion call that all the genetically products should be clearly labeled before they are put on sale. These manufacturers have cited the cost of the labeling process as being high.

These manufacturers believe that labeling genetically modified food would force the prices to increase their prices as a way of passing the cost to the customer. According to Davida (34), this argument has always been supported by some members of the public who are the consumers. According to this scholar, members of the public are always comfortable with the idea of not labeling the genetically modified food.

They share the idea of the producers that such processes would always increase the cost of the product which they are not ready to pay. It is a fact that through genetically modified foods, the price of food has gone down considerably. The consumers have come to appreciate the positive impact that genetically modified food has brought into their lives ever since it was discovered.

A section of the society still believes that genetically modified foods are as safe as other naturally grown products. According to Weiss (124), some scientists have been advocating for the use of genetically modified food not only because it is cheap to produce, but also because it is a safe product.

This argument has seen a section of society reject the idea of labeling genetically modified food. They argue that labeling of the genetically modified food would raise unnecessary concern within the society. As such, they believe that the products should not be labeled. Sateesh (87) says that labeling of the genetically modified foods will be like condemning these products in the market for no good reason.

This scholar says that the move will not act as an attraction of customers towards the product but a repellant. This scholar says that the tag will act as a warning that is given to the customers saying that they should be duly informed that the product they are purchasing is not a normal product. The message will be saying that the product has abnormal genes that may have a direct negative impact on their lives. Customers will always shy away from such products. They will consider them unfit for consumption.

The producers of such products will, therefore, be driven out of the market. This comes with serious consequences to the technological inventions and innovations in the market. The scientists who were involved in this technology will be forced to stop further exploration in this field because of public rejection.

With the current trend, those who are opposed to labeling of this product say that the world population will be double the current population. This will have a massive consequence on food production. With this huge population, these people argue that it is only genetically modified foods that can sustain them. When genetically modified foods are discriminated against, and the technology is brought to its knees, there will emerge a serious food problem in the society in the near future.

These people, therefore, insists that the society should learn to appreciate the importance of this technology in food production. Such unnecessary and discriminatory policies as labeling of the genetically modified foods should be stopped in order to help advance this technology and assure the population of constant and reliable food production.

Labeling of the genetically modified food should not be an issue that raises controversy the way it does. The society has lived in a transparent manner in terms of what we eat ever since the modernization age. When one walks into a hotel, one would order a simple meal like beans and rice for lunch.

This individual would not expect to be given meat pie and rice, or any other product that is not paid for. According to Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938, all food substances should be labeled (Nelson 76). This Act demands that all food substances should have all the ingredients labeled so that the consumers would know what they are purchasing before they can consume the product.

This Act is supported by the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 which demands of labeling of all food ingredients. These are laws observed within the United States of America. These laws have not been changed. Genetically modified foods have a different genetic modification from the normal products. This is a substantial reason that should make them be labeled differently from other products.

The law should not be applied selectively, and neither should it be undermined. When a manufacturer of bread adds eggs to his or her bread and fails to indicate that the bread has eggs as one of the ingredients, such a person would be liable for prosecution. The courts would send him or her to prison for several years for contravening the law. Those who produce genetically modified food should also be subjected to the same law because they are committing the same crime. The law should be fairly administered.

A section of the scientists has reported that genetically modified food have negative consequences that are still unknown to them. These scientists argue that genetically modified foods contain some genes which have some serious negative consequences on the health of consumers.

These scientists have embarked on a massive research to try and unearth some of the consequences of genetically modified foods on people. While these researchers are still working on this issue, the society should be given a choice to decide on whether they will consume genetically modified food or not. The choice can also be made when the products are labeled. Labeling of the products helps ensure that a consumer will be aware that a given food substance is genetically produced while others are not.

Although it has been difficult to determine the effect of genetically modified food, recent research of the effect of genetically modified food has shown a worrying trend that this food have on animals. The study, which was conducted on rats, showed that the genetically modified foods cause sterility on rats after three generations. This shows that when the first generation consumes genetically modified food, they are not affected by it and, therefore, shall reproduce normally.

The second generation will also be safe. In the third generation, reproduction will be impossible because the genetics of this organization in the third generation shall have been massively affected. Genetically modified foods were introduced about 20 years ago. This means that the current population is still in the first generation. They may not feel the effect of genetically modified food. Their children who will be the second generation may also not have problems with reproduction.

The problem will start in the third generation, when we are to base the reasoning on the results that these scientists have given (Okumu 78). This is enough reason to inform consumers that the product they are consuming is genetically modified. If the consumer is to base his or her reasoning on the recent research reports, then he or she would try avoiding these products. This can only be possible if the products are clearly labeled.

One of the main reasons why consumers like their food labeled is because of the nutrition they get from these foods. There are consumers who are under medication. Such consumers would have prescribed nutrients that should be gotten from some foods. Such individuals would always rely on labeling of the ingredients in order to ascertain the quality of food eaten.

This can only be possible if they are given all the ingredients of their food on the label. Failure to do this will be condemning them. This may affect them negatively. This will be contravening the law which demands that all the genetically modified foods should be labeled.

Research has also shown that genetically modified foods come with an allergy to the animals. They attribute this to the introduction of foreign proteins in the genetically modified food. This may explain the constant rise in allergy problems among the American populace. The recent rise in immune disorders can possibly be attributed to consumption of genetically modified foods. For the purpose of clarity, it would be important to label these genetically modified foods so that the consumer can choose whether to purchase these products or not.

According to Sateesh (92), it is a fact that the use of pesticide has increased with the introduction of the genetically modified foods. According to this scholar, scientists have proven beyond any doubt that when using genetically modified crops, there should be an increase in the use of pesticides in order to protect the crops.

This is because these crops are prone to some forms of pests. In order to avoid pest destruction, there has to be a constant use of pest. The pesticides are not only necessary when the crop is at the farm. The pesticide should also be in use when the crop is in the store waiting for the delivery to the consumer. This means that a consumer will be buying a product that has a heavy presence of pesticide. Pesticides are chemicals meant to kill pests. In its simplest definition, pesticides are poisons.

When a consumer buys such a poisonous product, it needs no scientific genius to know that the effect will be massively destructive. The consumer may not realize this instantly (Rudisill 220). This is because he or she will be consuming small quantities of the poison every time he eats the product. When one takes the poison in small quantities consistently, and for a long time, it will bring out its effect. In most of the cases, it is always too late to help such an individual. The poison shall have taken its toll on him or her.

Most of the European countries have genetically modified crops in their countries. They cite the negative impact that genetically modified crops have on the health of consumers. France for instance, has banned growing of genetically modified crops because of the possible cross pollination.

The genetically modified crops would cross pollinate with the non-GMO plants. This will make the final product have the effects of the GMO. For this reason, the governments of most of the European countries have banned the use of genetically modified crops. In the United States, the treatment is very different. The government has not issued an official ban on the sale of, or growing the genetically modified crops.

This is because of the democracy that the government feels that the farmers should be allowed. However, this genetically modified food should be clearly labeled so that one would be aware. If these European countries could issue a total ban on genetically modified crops, and their sale, then the citizens of the United States should have at least some right to know the products that are genetically produced. This would give them the freedom to make the choice of either consuming the products or not.

The involvement of Monsanto Company in the opposition to the move to label the genetically modified foods leaves a lot to be desired. According to Nelson (87), this company is known for its self interest and the need to reap maximally from the public without giving any attention to the demands of the public. This scholar reports that Monsanto was on the front line trying to fight farmers who were not willing to move the GMO way.

This was because they were the leading sellers of the genetically modified seeds to the farmers. To them, those farmers that were reluctant in adopting the new technology were dragging food production in this country. In essence, this company was fighting these farmers because of its own selfish interests. This scholar also brings back the memory of this firm assuring the public of the safety of Agent Orange and DDT as safe products that could be used as household items (Lenaola 46).

Given the fact that at that time it had won the trust of the public, the American public was convinced that these products were safe for use domestically. Monsanto was then considered as one of the companies that were determined to transform the society positively through innovation and inventions in the field of agriculture. This trust did eliminate any doubt that the public could have on the use of the two products which then became common household items.

After a long period of over one year, scientists would later discover that these products were not safe for domestic use. This was after the public had been massively affected, and there was an increase in issues related to health among the heaviest users of this product. This was an unethical behavior exhibited by this firm. There was no direct heavy consequence that the government laid on this firm even after it was confirmed that it had misled the public and caused health complications on some.

Lastly, ethics demands that when in the market, transparency is of utmost importance. It is important to ensure that all the products sold to the public are of known ingredients and from known sources.

When selling food substance to the public, Weirich (114) says that one should realize the fact that this food will have a direct effect on his or her health. The government may not have banned the sale of genetically modified crops in this country. However, there are some individuals who strongly believe that they cannot consume genetically modified foods.

It would be fair to inform such individuals through labeling, that these are genetically modified products. Such an individual would make a personal decision on whether to consume this product or not. It is also intriguing why the producers of genetically modified crops are strongly opposing the need to label their products, while at the same time insisting that they are safe. If they are safe as they proclaim, then let them be labeled.

There has been a massive debate as to whether or not genetically modified foods should be labeled or not. The proponents and opponents of this move have given their reasons with equal force. However, the world of today demands that ethics should be maintained. Revealing the ingredients of food products is one such ethical requirement. Before one eats a given food, he or she should know all the ingredients. For this reason, all the genetically modified foods should be labeled clearly.

Davida, Kenneth. What Can Nanotechnology Learn from Biotechnology? Social and Ethical Lessons for Nanoscience from the Debate Over Agrifood Biotechnology and Gmos . Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008. Print.

Lenaola, Valorie. “The Need to Label Genetically Modified Food.” The Journal of Nutrition 35.1 (2008): 37-56. Print.

Marchant, Gary. Thwarting Consumer Choice: The Case against Mandatory Labeling for Genetically Modified Foods . Washington: AEI Press, 2010. Print.

Nelson, Gerald. Genetically Modified Organisms in Agriculture: Economics and Politics . San Diego: Academic Press, 2001. Print.

Okumu, Paul. “Labeling Genetically Modified Food.” The Philosophical and Legal Debate . 56.2 (2007): 26-79. Print.

Rudisill, Careen. “Are Feelings of Genetically Modified Food Politically Driven?” Risk Management Attitudes and Behaviour 10.3 (2008): 218-234. Print.

Sateesh, Macbeth. Bioethics and Biosafety . New Delhi: I.K International Pub. House, 2008. Print.

Weirich, Paul. Labeling Genetically Modified Food: The Philosophical and Legal Debate . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.

Weiss, Edith. Reconciling Environment and Trade . Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008. Print.

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• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, December 19). Should All Genetically Modified Foods Be Labeled? https://ivypanda.com/essays/should-all-genetically-modified-foods-be-labeled/

"Should All Genetically Modified Foods Be Labeled?" IvyPanda , 19 Dec. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/should-all-genetically-modified-foods-be-labeled/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Should All Genetically Modified Foods Be Labeled'. 19 December.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Should All Genetically Modified Foods Be Labeled?" December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/should-all-genetically-modified-foods-be-labeled/.

1. IvyPanda . "Should All Genetically Modified Foods Be Labeled?" December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/should-all-genetically-modified-foods-be-labeled/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Should All Genetically Modified Foods Be Labeled?" December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/should-all-genetically-modified-foods-be-labeled/.