Gentically modified foods, good or bad?

Essay by peachoe619High School, 10th gradeA, May 2004

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The world population has just recently reached 6 billion people and is predicted to double in the next 50 years. Providing an adequate food supply for this 12 billion people is going to be a major problem that we are going to have to face in the generations to come. Only genetically modified foods promise to answer this problem in a number of ways.

One of the first and most basic ways we are going to address this problem is with making our fruits and vegetables more cold tolerant. As many people already know, frost and low temperatures can destroy seedlings. Recently an antifreeze gene from cold water fish has been placed into different plants making them more resistant to low temperatures and frost that would normally kill or destroy them. By doing this we could extend the growing season by a few months, and get more crops grown in a longer period of time.

Also, we would not have to worry about shipping the foods to colder climates because the food would be able to handle the temperatures.

Another way genetically modified foods is going to help the world is by making food, such as rice, more nutritious in third world countries. Malnutrition in third would countries is all to common. Many of these people are malnourished because their diets rely on only the food that they can grow, in many cases, rice. However, rice does not contain the correct amounts of the vitamins and minerals that everyone needs. But, if rice could be genetically modified to contain additional vitamins and minerals, deaths due to malnutrition would be greatly decreased.

A third way genetically modified foods are going to be beneficial to the environment is because of herbicide tolerance. It is not effective for the farmer to remove weeds...