Genetically Engineered for Failure
As the 21st century opens before us, new technologies pave the way to a bright, exciting future. Virtual reality, holograms, laser technology, and nanotechnology each promise to improve living for billions of people all across the globe. It’s too bad that millions of those people won’t live to see the first day of the year 2009 simply because they don’t have food. Each day, 38,000 children die of starvation, and world leaders place the blame on lack of food (MIM). For many people, the solution seems simple enough: In this new world of technological innovation, they say, why can’t we genetically alter crops to become more productive? Unfortunately, genetically engineered (GE) crops are not the cure-all of world hunger that they are hyped up to be. In fact, they may be more trouble than they are worth.
First of all, the root cause of starvation is not the fact that there is simply no food available to those who are starving. The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. (Danielle Knight). Even if genetic engineering could bring more crops to these people, it still wouldn’t keep them from starving to death, because they still couldn’t afford it. That is assuming that genetically engineered (GE) food would be more productive than existing crops. Actually, in some cases, it has been noted that some GE crop yields are less than conventional crops. (Shah). What, then, would be the point of replacing crops that already produce enough food with crops that don’t even yield as much?
The downturns go even further. To many, tampering with the genes of any organism seems like playing God, something that many people are not ready to accept. Looking deeper, even if GE foods were improved to the point that they out-produced traditional crops, they would still open up entirely new problems to be dealt with. GE crops like insect-resistant soybeans have nearly identical genetic codes as other plants of the same strain, which results in less genetic diversity; the less genetic diversity in an ecosystem, the more fragile and vulnerable it is to unforeseen stimuli, and the more fragile an ecosystem is, the greater the risk of the entire ecosystem being wiped out thereby totally eliminating a community’s food source.
The problems go beyond biological simplicity. On an economic level, GE crops are potentially devastating to the markets of developing nations. The economic gap between the rich and the poor is already atrocious, and GE food sources would only make the problem worse. It is the developed nations that are researching GE foods, not the poor countries that need them, so these already wealthy countries (like the US) are in a perfect position to exploit the third world nations like Ethiopia and Nicaragua that could benefit from the technology. Poor nations cannot afford to start the research themselves, and if the technology were to be outsourced to these countries, they still do not have the facilities to keep the system up and running.
The United States already produces over half of the world’s GE foods, (Human Genome Project) and once we catch developing nations with the fishhook of GE foods, those nations will have no option but to become totally dependant on our GE technology to survive. They would lose any chance of being able to get out of their position independently without enslaving themselves to another nation. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich US scientists and the poor, Ethiopian natives grows larger and larger, and the balance of power becomes even more uneven. Wealthy nations would hold the fates of millions in their hands, with the power to starve them into submission with a single word or let them live another day because of the GE foods. The source of life for the entire world would be placed in the hands of a few incredibly powerful companies, putting so many innocents at the mercy of money-hungry businessmen.
Furthermore, crops that are easy for their creators to control would also be vulnerable to negative human influence. Corrupted scientists could simply obtain the genetic coding of a strain of a GE crop, mutate it to become totally unproductive, and spread it around a starving world, gaining huge profits in the process. Power would be sure to go to several individuals heads, and in such a young field, those few could shut down the entire system. With this power, they could hold the populations of entire nations for ransom, and organized crime around the world would explode, negating the positive impact that GE foods could have on the human population.
On the home front, widespread development of genetically engineered crops would greatly interfere with the small farms in the US that have been feeding us for decades. If GE crops could become more productive than traditional crops, then only the companies large enough to afford the technology would be able to make the transition to GE. The small farms, much like Mom and Pop stores competing with Walmart, would not be able to handle the competition, and would be forced to shut down or merge with the larger companies. These large companies would eventually hold an oligopoly on the food industry, and they could simply raise the prices as high as they wanted to make even more money.
Though it may seem like seeding the desert with drought-resistant forms of GE wheat and corn would solve world hunger, this is simply not the case. Traditional crops like wheat are often more productive, and the widespread use of GE crops would do more harm than good to the economies and governments of needy nations. Obviously, it is not the incredible solution to everything that some over-zealous scientists thought that it would be. In fact, the world would be better off without it. Genetically engineered food research should be shut down, and the funds be given to the needy in developing countries so that they can actually afford food.
See also: Genetic engineering pros and cons
