GM Foods - Benefits and Negative Issues

Benefits of GM Foods

• Pest Resistant
  Pesticides are expensive and pollutes the environment, furthermore, consumers don't wish to eat something treated with chemical. By having crops genetically modified with Bt, it will produce a 'natural' insecticide which will not cause pollution.
  
• Herbicide Tolerant
  Without being genetically modified, the use of herbicides to kill weeds will also kill crops, this can cause farmers to lose a number of their crops.
  
• Disease Resistance
  Being disease resistance, crops can withstand intervention from bacteria, fungus and moulds.
  
• Drought tolerance/salinity tolerance
  As the world population grows and more land is utilized for housing instead of food production, farmers will need to grow crops in locations previously unsuited for plant cultivation. Creating plants that can withstand long periods of drought or high salt content in soil and groundwater will help people to grow crops in formerly inhospitable place
  
• Nutrition
  In countries where food are sparse and food not meet nutritional requirements, genetic engineering allows scientist to alleviate the amount of vitamins, minerals and other important nutrient for growth and development. Genetic Modification can also help to disspell hunger woes in 3rd world countries.

Paraphrased article from: http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/gmfood/overview.php

Other Benefits of GM Foods:

Better quality food

Higher nutritional yields

Inexpensive and nutritious food, like carrots with more antioxidants

Foods with a greater shelf life, like tomatoes that taste better and last longer

Food with medicinal benefits, such as edible vaccines - for example, bananas with bacterial or rotavirus antigens

Crops and produce that require less chemical application, such as herbicide resistant canola.

http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/genetically_modified_foods?opendocument

Negative Issues

Environmental Hazard
i) Unintended harm to other organisms
e.g. B.t. corn caused high mortality rates in monarch butterfly caterpillars. Monarch caterpillars consume milkweed plants, not corn, but the fear is that if pollen from B.t. corn is blown by the wind onto milkweed plants in neighboring fields, the caterpillars could eat the pollen and perish.

ii) Reduced effectiveness of pesticides
e.g. Just as some populations of mosquitoes developed resistance to the now-banned pesticide DDT, many people are concerned that insects will become resistant to B.t. or other crops that have been genetically-modified to produce their own pesticides.

iii)Gene transfer to non-target species
e.g. Another concern is that crop plants engineered for herbicide tolerance and weeds will cross-breed, resulting in the transfer of the herbicide resistance genes from the crops into the weeds. These "superweeds" would then be herbicide tolerant as well.

Effects on Humans
i) Allerginicity
ii) Unknown effects

Ethics
i) Violation of natural organisms' intrinsic values
ii) Tampering with nature by mixing genes among species
iii) Objections to consuming animal genes in plants and vice versa
iv) Stress for animal

Labelling

i) Not mandatory in some countries (e.g., United States)
ii) Mixing GM crops with non-GM confounds labeling attempts

Products that needs Labelling:

1. If the product is a genetically modified organism (GMO):
e.g. GM Potato

2. If the product contains genetically modified microorganisms
e.g. Cheese with GM moulds

3. If the product was directly made from genetically modified organisms, whether or not ....they can be found in the final product
e.g. Breakfast cereal made from GM maize

4. If the product contains additives or flavors that were directly made from genetically ....modified organisms. As with foods, all additives and flavors require labeling if the ....direct production line stems from genetically modified plants and plant products
e.g. Lecithin from GM soy

GM Foods Research Materials from:

http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/gmfood/overview.php

http://www.gmo-watch.com/pages/facts.asp

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/gmfood.shtml