Genetically Engineered Food: Pros & Cons

Pros

Increase nutrients content

In many third world countries, Malnutrition is very common as people only rely on limited kind of food for living, like rice or crop. According to scientist's research, rice only contains a small amount of necessary nutrients that human body needs. However, if rice could be genetically engineered to be made containing more necessary vitamins or minerals, malnutrition then could be well prevented. Specifically, many people in those poor countries have vitamin A deficiency. European scientists then created a strain of golden rice that contains two genes from a daffodil and one from a bacterium to generate rice that contains higher level of vitamin A than the usual rice in order to benefit the people in those countries, as far as we know, this kind of rice does help a lot.

Pest resistance

Insect and pests can be very harmful to the crop harvest, which will lead to financial lost or even starvation in developing countries. As a result, some farmers use tons of chemical pesticides to prevent this kind of damage. However, the excessive use of pesticides can poison the water supply, harm the environment, which in other words, cause even more damages than the insect pests. Also, people are not willing to eat food that has been treated with pesticides because of potential health hazards. Growing GM foods such as Bt. corn can help eliminate the application of chemical pesticides. It is resistant to pest; Therefore, it can improve the quality and increase the production because less plant would be damaged.

Herbicide tolerance

Farmers always spray a big number of quantities of different herbicides can kill weeds, because of its more efficiency than removing weeds by hands. However, this is an expensive and time-consuming process. As a result, if we genetically engineered the crop that tolerances herbicide to be resistant to it, the environmental damage due to herbicide using will decrease. For example, a strain of GM soybean has been modified to be resistant to a type of herbicide called the "Roundup" . The farmer who grows this kind of soybean will then only need to spray one weed-killer instead of multiple of them, which has significantly reduced the production cost and environmental damages.

Cons

Allergenicity

There is an increasing number of children have life-threatening allergies to peanuts and other foods in recent years. Possibly, the genetically engineered foods create new allergens that lead to extremely allergic reactions. This fear has caused the abandon of a proposal to implant a Brazil nuts' gene into soybeans.

Gene transfer to non-target species

The process of transferring gene to another non-target species has raised another argument that "crop plants engineered for herbicide tolerance and weeds" will cross-breed, which will make these so called "superweeds" that can tolerate the herbicide as well. As the explanation above, many genes may cross over in other crops next to the GM crops; this situation will raise lawsuits or other types of moral problems.

Unintended harm to other organisms

A study from last year shows that pollen from GM corn can cause high mortality rates in monarch butterfly caterpillars, if the pollen is blown onto some milkweed plants nearby, the caterpillars will eat the pollen and perish. Secondly, it is impossible to produce a toxin that only kill the target pests and have no effect on other plants or insects.