The Food Police Chapter 6 Summary

Agronomists have been working on these problems for years, but the rapid population growth of humans makes overcoming these challenges increasingly urgent. If we can’t feed the world, it will eventually feed on us.” (Newsweek/United Nations) Scientists find a way to add “medicine” to plant genes, which help it withstands pest attacks and drought problems.“Some GMO corn crops can protect harvests in water-limited conditions better than conventionally produced crops. Other GMOs can also promote use of no-till farming, which keeps more moisture in the soil. No-till also enables farmers to make fewer passes through the field using machinery, which means less fuel used and greenhouse gases emitted.”(Monsanto) GMOs are useful for helping with planting crops in any area of the world.

In the essay “Genetically Modified Food: Watching What We Eat,” by Julie Cooper, she argues against the rampant use of genetically modified food (GMO) without any current form of regulation. Cooper discusses the possibility of health risks to those consuming foods with altered genes and the food’s capabilities to have far-reaching health risks. She continues with a discussion as to how and why the creation and use of the GMOs have become so unregulated. She then discusses the response, which is the public’s cry for their right to make informed choices. Other topics discusses are the political, environmental, and corporate ramifications of the rise of GMOs.

1st. Body: GMO’s are organisms whose genetic data has been manipulated through genetic engineering. In most cases these organisms are given a new gene to exhibit a specific trait (ex: Genes of fish in Alaska are used to help plants thrive in colder climates) which hopefully can improve the usefulness of these organisms. To perform this, scientists select a specific gene/trait they hope the target organism will express, and cut using enzymes, and then insert it into a plasmid ( a molecule containing DNA). The plasmid is then added to bacteria, that infect the cells of the target organism. The selected organism grows up, and may exhibit the desired traits the scientists implemented it with. This process has been used on various crops, especially corn, which now expresses many new traits including resistance to insects and naturally produces pesticides. These new crops

Agriculture is one of key industries in both sub-Saharan Africa and Australia. In the recent few decades, agricultural production is under serious threat from severe drought, and the drought has triggered a series of chain-reactions involving important economic and social issues. To cope with various challenges, sub-Saharan Africa and Australia have already taken multiple approaches.

Rising GM foods such as B.t. corn can aid to remove the use of chemical pesticides and decrease the price of transporting crops to the market. A specific fascinating pro of genetically modified foods is how they can be encoded to be drought and cold resistant. By creating drought resistant seeds, even in the worst weeks of the dry season, or even in the driest parts of Africa, these crops will grow regardless the situation. This is a huge development of technology and science when it comes to creating this kind of foods. Being cold resistant is also a fascinating innovation instead of the modern growing season being in the summertime months, winter weather can also be a productive time for agriculturalists. This means more harvest and more income for framers.

GMO’s were created to offer increased yield, drought tolerance, enhanced nutrition, or any other consumer benefit.

Virtually all commercial GMOs are engineered to withstand direct application of herbicide and/or to produce an insecticide. Despite biotech industry promises, none of the GMO traits currently on the market offer increased yield, drought tolerance, enhanced nutrition, or any other consumer benefit.

Sahel was faced with drought conditions through 1910s, 1940, 1960, 1970s and the most recent one being in 2012. To understand the focus area’s and activities around measures taken to cope with repeated drought situation we will be looking closely at the development plan of South Sudan which gained its freedom from Sudan only in 2011. (S. Maskey, 2014)

The Sahel is an area in Africa which suffers droughts and it is hard to grow crops due to the hot climate. Seasonal shifts there lead to decreased rainfall and the drought tolerant maize helps farmers adapt to climate change.

From there the people, land, and globally worldwide view of what can be done to stop the negative results of the drought:With so little resources East Africa uses what they have chicken blood is used as a treatment to a malnourished person (Stewart, 2011). Immunizations

Crops can be modified to be protected against dangerous weather. For example, an unexpected frost can destroy sensitive seedlings. There is an antifreeze gene that is found in cold water fish which has been introduced into potato plants. These plants are then able to withstand cold temperatures that would normally would kill unmodified seedlings.

FAO can continue exploring more drought resistance crop production and early furcating of local food production so that Government and humanitarian agencies prepare advance plan to overcome the upcoming challenge of low food

What alarms the activist and pessimist is the safety of the genetically modified crops. But “more than 1,700 peer-reviewed safety studies have been published, including five lengthy reports from the National Research Council, that focus on human health and the environment. The scientific consensus is that existing GMOs are no more or less risky than conventional crops” (Popular Science). The GMO crops are produced through altering genes that have been modified from genes derived from traditionally grown crops. Through the studies, they have proven that the biotechnology of GMOs is as safe as traditionally grown crops. In “The most comprehensive study of

The key is in the production. The growth of GM crops is faster than the conventional seeds. For that reason, farmers can produce more and more. These seeds are resistant to cold and hot weather and have more chances to resist dryness than the others. Also, these crops are herbicide resistant; that means that farmers can spray with herbicide and defeat the weeds without altering the crop. For that reason, a lot of money is saved by the reduced use of pesticides, and the cost of production is benefited. Almost 8.25 millions farmers all over the world planted genetically modified seeds in 2004, compared to 7 million in 2003, said the international Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA)(“Biotech” 1).

Concerned parents and health-nuts alike cry out in alarm as they discover that their favorite cereal contains GMOs. However, these concerned consumers are rarely, if ever, well informed about what precisely a GMO is and what that entails, as well as where the scientific controversy regarding them lies. GMOs are not inherently harmful to humans and instead warrant an individual case by case evaluation. To understand why this is, it is important to know what GMOs are and why we have them, why the process of creating a GMO doesn’t make them harmful, where the confusion surrounding GMOs comes from, and ultimately that GMOs can’t all be thrown together and labeled as good or bad.