* The 2014-2015 senior student signature series features area senior class students – and their own “signature” outlooks on a topic of their choice. A new outlook will be posted on Cross-Counties Connect each Friday. The series opens with point of view comments by seniors from Mountain Lake Public High School. The opinions can be found by clicking on the Family & Faith link on the website’s header, and scrolling down to, and clicking on, Outlook. Their teachers are Brenda Feil, Kim Syverson and Debby Jass.
The Future of the World
GMOs – are they the future of the world or will they be the death of the world?
GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, are a hot topic; some people believe we need them to feed our world while others think they will be the death of us. Although people may not like GMOs, I believe we need them to supply enough food for of the world.
From the beginning of agricultural times, farmers have tried to find ways to increase their production. For example, natives would take the seeds from the biggest and best heads of wheat to use as seed for the next year’s crop. With the progress in technology in recent years, scientists have taken the job from the farmers’ hands and put it in their labs. Scientists have made crops with better yields so that farmers could grow more products on the same amount of land and require fewer pesticides and herbicides, saving the farmer money, which eventually causes food prices to be cheaper. This also provides cleaner air and water because the farmers are not spraying chemicals in the ground. Another benefit of GMOs is that they can make the shelf-life longer on items, cutting down on the waste of food.
One of the main concerns with GMOs is whether or not people will develop new allergies to the foods they eat; this problem is potentially life threatening, but modifying could also make it so people could eat the foods they used to be allergic to by adding and removing genes to the organisms or taking out the gene they were allergic to. Another problem with GMOs is that they can allow a disease to spread like wildfire if scientists put a harmful gene in some of the food we eat. Genetically modified organisms could also help stop outbreaks because scientists can remove a bacteria from the genes. A scary fact with GMOs is that we do not know the long-terms effects of these products because this is still relatively new. Even though genetically modified organisms’ primary goal is to produce more on less land, the possibility that a gene could mutate and could take out an entire season’s crop gives us a bigger problem than we had before, but chances of that happening are extremely slim. Lastly, one of the concerns with GMOs is that pesticides are being injected directly into the product that could be harmful to the people consuming them; however, there have been no facts to prove that these will affect the human population at all.
Finally, the decision to use GMOs or not comes down to a moral compass. Some people say that GMOs have no downsides but still do not support the idea of GMOs because they say we are acting like God, saying God gave us corn to plant, and we should not mess with the order of their DNA. On the other side of the argument, supporters say God would not have given us the ability to modify this organism if he did not want us to; supporters also say that God knew the world would become over populated and this is one of his solutions to this problem.
In conclusion, when deciding whether or not to use GMOs, just remember that people involved in agriculture have been trying to modify since the beginning of time, harvesting the biggest and best seeds for the next year. With the growing population and the farmable land shrinking because of cities getting bigger scientists went to work developing GMOs. Nearly seventy percent of everything in a local store is from GMOs, and without them we could see the world literally starve to death. With that being said, the only way to keep up with the world and how fast the population is growing is to look into GMOs and see how we can produce more of them.