Mateen L. Utah

Are You Going To Eat That?

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are given much more hate than they should. GMOs can solve many problems that face our society, without causing any more harm.

Don’t you hate being hungry. Imagine you don’t have food, for an entire day, you just don’t eat. Now imagine a week without food, a month. I personally can’t really even imagine it. It would be the worst, I can barely go 12 hours without food let alone an entire month. I fortunately have not had to worry about not having food on my plate. Being a lover of food, I also volunteer at a soup kitchen where we give food to people without much money. It does so much to help those people who would otherwise go hungry. Now what if we could do that all over the world? Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are plants that have been modified with different properties to make them easier to grow or to make them have more health benefits. They were created to make different plants more accessible to farmers and to make them more plentiful. Although GMOs are often believed to be unhealthy, they are better than they are given credit for.

People often make claims about GMOs as to why they are bad. An article by Jeffery Smith summarizes these complaints. Most of the complaints consist of the GMOs not being healthy for different reasons or contaminating the gene pool of the plant, as well as believing that they negatively affect the environment. There are many of the main complaints that plague Americans today. The only thing about this article was that it lacked substantial evidence to prove these claims. Even the evidence they put in the article was put out of context and not analysed. So I went and hunted for evidence against GMOs and reliable evidence wasn’t very apparent. More people used “GMOs are bad” as click bait for evidence saying that they are good, and I actually couldn’t find any scientific evidence GMOs are bad. Though I understand and give merit to the concerns about GMOs, they have been studied long enough that current studies are thorough and express the truth about GMOs.

Studies proving GMOs are safe are everywhere, are peer reviewed, and are very plentiful. An article by Layla Katiraee shows the logical fallacies and evidentiary mishaps of the different ‘studies’ proving GMOs are bad, and gives actual evidence. A great article by Kate Siegel and Suzanne Verity show all the benefits of GMOs: “Mixing plant species is how we've gotten papayas free of viruses, corn plants that survive drought, soybeans that stand up to weed killer, potatoes that don't bruise, and crops that yield more and cost less… Swiss researchers created a strain of "golden" rice with a lot of beta-carotene, an antioxidant good for your eyes and skin.” As shown by these statistics, GMOs are not only helping the farmers trying to grow them, but they can also help people. These GMOs, that have been proven time and time again to be healthy, can also be grown more plentifully, which will eventually cause our produce to be cheaper. By making produce cheaper, you can help many people who don’t have as much money to put food on their table. These are just a few of the many benefits of GMOs, and they can do some amazing things outside the country as well.

GMOs can be used to do many amazing things, including growing plants in different places of the world. GMOs could be used to not only to make more crops here in the US, but they could be used in places like India, China, Africa, places where there is less food either because there are too many people or because of the environment, we can give them more food. We could effectively end world hunger through GMOs. Not only that, but through different changes, like golden rice, we could also help create a better quality of life. Helen Kollias from Precision Nutrition says, “Up to 500,000 children lose their sight each year due to vitamin A deficiency, with half of them dying within 12 months of going blind. Golden rice would prevent this.” By blocking GMOs from grocery stores and by keeping people from taking it to other countries, we are killing countless people just because of people’s uninformed concerns. Not only could this help people in the United States, but this could also help people around the world. I stated earlier in my evidence that GMOs could be used to grow produce in a drought. This could effectively help people around the world because this could be used to grow produce in all sorts of places. This could effectively solve world hunger, and that is a goal worth fighting for.

GMOs not only aren’t bad, but have more benefits than normal food and could effectively end world hunger. It is because of uninformed opinions that people are scared of them. If we educated the people and took the power from fear mongering organizations that want to control crops, then we could end world hunger and save a bunch of money in agriculture. It's a win for everyone, and that's a fact.

Spanish Fork High School

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