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Walk into a supermarket today, and you'll see countless items labeled "non-GMO" on the shelves. It's usually found next to the gluten-free or fat-free label. This label, while not mentioning GMOs, is clearly intended to reassure you, the consumer. It guarantees that the food you're about to eat is healthy because it doesn't contain genetically modified ingredients!
There's an entire organization, the Non-GMO Project, created with a logo of a small orange butterfly and all the rest to help you identify foods that aren't genetically modified. This clearly implies that GMOs are harmful or even dangerous, but is that really true? According to the Non-GMO Project, genetically modified organisms consist of a combination of plant, animal, bacterial, and viral genes that are never found in nature, and there are no long-term studies to determine their safety.
So, let's look at what the science says. More than 901 TP3T of all cotton, soybeans, and corn grown in the United States by 2024 is genetically modified. Are there any dangers, and what exactly are they? Is your GMP-produced rice safe to eat, or are you doomed to become a food mutant?
Dangers
Let's start with the potential dangers of GMOs, as detailed by the Non-GMO Project. Their website highlights two often-overlooked points. First, GMO seeds can become a burden on farmers and even harm their livelihoods. Precautions must be taken to prevent contamination of GMO crops with non-GMO crops, and vice versa. Imagine the difficulty of preventing cross-pollination between crops, which could lead to the development of new crops that may or may not be inadvertently GMO. This could seriously impact how food products are grown, labeled, and sold.
Furthermore, GMO seeds are patented by the companies that produce them. This means farmers cannot store or produce their own seeds, and if they attempt to plant seeds derived from their own crops, companies like Monsanto can sue them for patent infringement.
Genetically modified crops can also be extremely harmful to the environment. One modification many crops undergo is herbicide resistance. While it's desirable for crops to be resilient and not easily killed, this seems like a good idea at first glance. However, herbicide resistance means a sharp increase in their use. In Canada alone, sales of herbicides like Roundup, which has been linked to cancer for years, have increased by nearly 2,000 TP3T.
It has also been suggested that increased herbicide use has led to a decline in native plant species while promoting the proliferation of herbicide-resistant weeds.
No risk and potential improvements
While some environmental factors must be considered, they also come with certain benefits. The use of some herbicides has increased, but some studies suggest that global pesticide and other chemical use has decreased by 371%, while crop yields have increased by 221%, and farm profits have increased by 641%.
Because pesticides don't need to be sprayed as frequently, greenhouse gas emissions have also been reduced thanks to GM crops. In 2018, this was equivalent to removing 15 million cars from the road.
In countries less developed than the United States and other Western nations, agriculture has traditionally been much harsher and more dangerous. Genetically modified crops have significantly reduced pesticide poisonings in developing countries. South Africa has recorded a significant decline in the number of farmers suffering from pesticide use. In China, a third of farmers who do not use genetically modified cotton reported poisoning, compared to 9% who did. In India, there were at least 38 million fewer cases of poisoning between 2003 and 2019, but the figure may be much higher.
The first genetically modified crop in the United States was the Flavr Savr tomato, introduced in 1994. It was modified to slow the ripening process and prevent rapid spoilage, unlike other tomato varieties. Researchers at the Institute for Responsible Technology quickly condemned GMO foods. Their studies claimed that toxic effects on rats were almost immediate. No other scientist has been able to replicate these results in the laboratory.
Numerous studies conducted by various groups in different countries have found no adverse health effects in people consuming genetically modified foods. Even at the microscopic level, no specific effects associated with GMOs have been detected.
Studies were also conducted on rats fed genetically modified corn to determine whether any defects could be passed down through generations. Even after four generations, the rats showed no negative effects in any of the tissues or organs that would be expected to be affected if the defects were inherited.
GMO crops are not modified in a way that could cause health problems in humans or any other animals that consume them. This work is extremely strictly regulated to ensure that the genes used to modify these organisms are well understood, and the regulations are much stricter than those for non-GMO foods.
Rather than being a dangerous mad science project, the gene in the Flavr Savr tomato that prevents spoilage was already present in the tomato itself. Scientists copied the gene and inserted it into a bacterial cell devoid of harmful substances, essentially using it as a shell to house the gene and nothing more. Once introduced into the tomato, the gene inhibits the production of an enzyme that accelerates spoilage, allowing the tomato to stay fresh longer. Nothing harmful was introduced, and nothing could cause allergies, cancer, mutations, or anything else beyond what was already present. The belief that this is possible is based solely on a poor understanding of science or outright lies.
Cancer research groups also note that there's no logic to concerns about cancer caused by GMO foods, as they simply don't work that way. There's no evidence that they've caused cancer in the past, and no scientifically sound explanation for how this could happen. Since the introduction of GMOs in the United States, there has been no significant increase in cancer cases.
GMO foods save lives
In the Western world, it's harder to appreciate the full importance of genetically modified crops. To us, a tomato that stays fresh longer might not seem so important. In regions of the world where famine is a real threat and people die every day, genetically modified crops are credited with saving a billion lives. Crops with higher yields, insect resistance, and drought resistance mean that people who would otherwise starve are now able to eat.
GMO apples, which don't oxidize or brown as quickly, help reduce food waste, and GMO soybeans can produce healthier oil. While the novelty of varieties like Arctic Apples is one example of how GMOs can change the food we eat, the real issue is ensuring sufficient food supply and nutritional value.
Genetically modified rice, engineered to increase beta-carotene content in the grain, was expected to save millions of lives. Because it converts to vitamin A after consumption, it would have been invaluable in regions of the world where vitamin A deficiency claims a million lives annually and causes half as many cases of blindness. Unfortunately, despite the lack of evidence of danger, "golden rice" was never grown or made available because anti-GMO groups, including Greenpeace, opposed it and convinced governments to ban it. It has yet to be grown on a large scale, despite studies showing it contains more vitamin A than spinach.
Nearly 800 million people on Earth regularly experience hunger. About 9 million of them die each year. GMO crops alone aren't enough to solve this problem—they've been around for decades, and hunger clearly persists—but they can reduce these numbers. Higher yields with improved nutritional value and greater sustainability mean more people will be able to eat.
What GMOs exist?
We've already covered the many genetically modified foods that exist around the world. From apples to corn and rice, the options are endless. Chances are, you've already eaten grains, soy products, sugar, and all sorts of other genetically modified foods, perhaps without even realizing it. There are even newer products out there.
AquAdvantage salmon is a genetically modified salmon that can grow to market size twice as fast. It's one of the first living, breathing GMOs, and people seem to be more wary of this fish than plants, despite the lack of any evidence of danger. The media has begun calling them "Frankenfish.".
In Canada, pigs known for producing large amounts of potentially toxic manure due to high phosphorus levels have also been genetically modified. The new EnviroPig breed was bred to naturally produce an enzyme, commonly added to their diet by farmers, which helps reduce dangerous phosphorus levels. Some cows have also become less likely to fart and burp, which translates into less methane emissions.
One of the most impressive inventions in the world of genetic engineering is goats bred to produce spider silk. The genes responsible for silk production modified the goats' milk-producing glands, so that when the goat is milked, spider silk is produced. These experiments are ongoing because spider silk has many potential uses around the world; it's just incredibly difficult to obtain using conventional methods due to the spiders' surprisingly small and unruly nature.
Scientists are currently working on creating poisonous cabbage. Scorpion genes are being used to enable the cabbage to produce a poison in its leaves, which will be modified to be harmless to humans but also serve as a powerful deterrent to pests such as caterpillars. As a natural pesticide, this process could significantly reduce the use of chemicals while protecting the environment.
At first glance, all this sounds strange, and it's easy to portray any of these ideas as dangerous. However, the obvious purpose of these modifications and their benefits also become quite clear if you take the time to study the issue. This is the goal of any GMO: to improve the situation.
Contradictions
If science claims there's nothing wrong with GMO crops, then why do so many people, organizations, and even governments oppose them? A group of Belgian biotechnologists once published an article arguing that one of the reasons for such strong opposition to GMOs is that it simply seems right. Our minds easily understand why they must be bad, and so we simply believe it.
The fact is, most GMO opponents don't know as much as they think. Research shows that those who are most opposed and consider themselves experts actually know the least. And there's nothing wrong with ignorance; almost none of us knew about GMOs before we tried our first tomato, so it's worth learning before we judge.
For some, such as chefs, the GMO issue is less about the science and more about corporate control over the food supply. This is a far more serious issue than the potential health risks.
An anti-GMO activist who has switched to other technologies.
Incidentally, some people were initially against GMOs but changed their minds after learning more about them. Environmental activist Mark Lynas even previously destroyed GMO crops. He believed that science was interfering with some of nature's fundamental building blocks, and that not only could he not support this, but he should actively fight it.
Over the years, as he became increasingly concerned with environmental issues like climate change, he also delved deeper into the science behind them and realized that his initial position was profoundly anti-scientific. After studying the processes behind GMO production, he changed his mind and urged others who shared his earlier beliefs to do the same and not impede progress that could feed the hungry.
As with everything else, the key to understanding is studying the material and making decisions when you have all the information, not just part of it.
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