World Does not Need GM Foods

Essay by ua_sharkyCollege, UndergraduateB, December 2009

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World Does not Need GM FoodsFood is a kind of energy that makes people healthy and strong. It is the most requisite thing for people in order to survive. Therefore, people always need food. At the same time, population of the world has increased a lot. Now, it is about 6 billion and in 2025 about 8.3 billion people will live in the world. Rising population will bring a problem, which is feeding lots of people. Therefore, some companies have already offered a solution to this problem, namely the second Green Revolution which is also called the Gene Revolution. It is associated with biotechnology. For example, by biotechnology, some genes from different species are transferred to crops to enable these crops to have herbicide resistance or they become resistant to other environmental effects. The companies such as Monsanto and Novartis use these technologies. The aim of using it is producing more food, improving food, providing nutritional security and increasing yields.

Although these companies want to do these things, these methods do not actually work and they even bring some problems such as farmer's decreasing yield, causing health problems and decreasing the diversity.

Increased yield from genetically engineered crops is the utmost important argument used by the genetic engineering industry. Although Borlaug claims that yields are increasing for every farmer, the Gene Revolution has actually decreased yields. Shiva mentions that "Ed Oplinger, professor of Agronomy at the University of Wisconsin, has been carrying out yield trials on soya bean for 25 years, on the basis of data he collected in 12 states that grow 30 percent of U.S soya; he found genetically engineered soya beans had 4 percent lower yields than conventional varieties." And she says that the higher yields only exist in falsified corporate generated data and she proves her...