At this very moment, an estimated six hundred and ninety-one to seven hundred and eighty-three million people do not have enough food to eat. One hundred and twenty-two million more people in 2022 than in 2019 faced hunger. One of the main factors for food poverty is climate change; recent years have seen an increase in extreme weather conditions such as droughts and flash floods as a direct result of global warming and these adverse events can cause catastrophic crop failures. Another key cause of malnutrition is poverty; many people with low incomes are unable to afford high-quality nutritious meals and may be forced to skip meals altogether.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have the potential to solve world hunger. Genetically modified organisms are those in which a gene has been transferred into a different organism’s DNA to create desirable qualities, for example immunity to crop destroying bacteria. All reference to GMOs in this article will be refering to crops; however other GMOs are also often used in research for example, in the recent adaptation of a pig heart for human transfusion. Some of the largest users of GMO crops include the USA, Brazil, Argentina, and Canada: however others, such as Germany, France, and Switzerland have total or partial bans on the growth and sale of GMOs entirely. Even the UK has no GMO crops grown commercially as of 2015.
The countries who are against the use of GMOs believe that their usage could damage the enviroment and consumers. There is evidence that suggests that GMOs can fail to germinate, causing crop failure and placing farmers in a worse situation than if they had not grown GMOs. Additionally, some GMOs which have been genetically engineered act as natural pesticides might kill other organisms that are beneficial to plants and can transfer virus resistance to wild relatives of the crop species. This makes it particularly difficult for regular crops to be grown after GMOs. In addition, GMOs may kill beneficial organisms and as a result the crop yield of the GMOs could be lower than their natural counterpart, and the overall reduction of biodiversity from the death of the other organisms negatively impacts ecosystem productivity.
There is also a fear of detrimental consequences on human health from eating GMOs. While there is currently no concrete research providing evidence that human health can be harmed from the eating of commercially available GMOs, many people have little faith in the companies promoting GMOs and due to its synthetic nature people worry it may pose long term health issues which are yet to be discovered.
Furthermore there is also a concern that GMO providers may genetically engineer crops to not naturally regenerate, forcing customers to become reliant on these companies in order to continue to eat. Such a malicious act could occur out of a desire to maximise profit and secure investors for these companies. This would have a distinct negative impact on the overall goal of reducing world hunger as consumers would be forced to buy costly new seeds each year.
Despite this, supporters of GMOs believe there are many benefits which outweigh the possible disadvantages. GMOs have lower production costs and tend to have higher crop yields. In theory, this should allow more food to be placed on the market at lower costs, providing food access and security to more people.
Additionally, GMOs can be engineered to be drought resistant. Preventing drought from impacting crops could increase crop yields providing more food and hence greater food security in locations where it would otherwise be almost impossible to efficiently grow food due to frequent drought conditions.
GMOs also tend to use fewer pesticides and herbicides whilst growing. Both these products can have devastating impacts on the environment. Pesticides can kill important fauna such as bees and other vital pollinating insects. They are often toxic and can find their way into water supplies, killing more wildlife and possible damaging human life as well. Hence GMOs, engineered to be pest resistant, can be utilised as an alternative, reducing the requirement for such dangerous chemicals.
GMOs have been used in the past to combat vitamin deficiency. According to the World Health Organisation Vitamin A deficiency is a public health problem for more than half of all countries. Named for its distinctive golden colour, Golden Rice was manufactured by Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer to combat vitamin A deficiency in areas of Asia. Golden Rice was engineered to contain beta carotene which allows the human body to produce more Vitamin A. Golden Rice performed well in trials and had the potential to dramatically reduce deaths associated with vitamin A deficiency. Zeneca bought the rights to Golden Rice in 2000 on the terms that they provided Golden Rice for free to farmers and funded futher research. Unfortunately due to tightening of regulations first introduced in the Europe in 2000 and the large-scale Greenpeace protests in 2001, Zeneca (now Syngenta) returned the rights to Golden Rice and it ceased mass scale production production. Despite this set back Golden Rice is still in circulation; however on a smaller scale.
With the increasingly hostile enviroment around us and the growing population, it is becoming more vital to combat food poverty. GMOs have a place within that solution. As demonstrated with the example of Golden Rice, they not only can provide higher rates of food security within drought prone areas, but also have health benefits including combating vitamin deficiencies. Careful monitoring and research is required to prevent damage to local wildlife and to confirm the lack of long-term risk to human health as well as strict independant governance of GMO providers, but with the undoubtable potential to provide essential crops to low and middle income countries in the face of increasingly severe consequences of climate change it is clear that GMOs play a substantial role in the future of worldwide food security.
