Genetically Modified Organisms

Genetically Engineering
A Dual Perspective on World Hunger
Leslie Abad
SCI 207
Instructor Wessinger
November 12, 2012









Genetic Engineering according to Turk and Bensel is: “The deliberate modification of the characteristics of an organism by manipulating its genetic material” (Turk, J., & Bensel, T. 2011). Its objective is to find new waysto increase productivity while reducing costs. The question is: Is Genetically Engineering the solution to world hunger and what is the price tag?
For centuries, hereditary similarity has been used to improve the productivity of plants and animals. When cultivated, plants were selected because of their greater size, strength, and less disposition to disease, consequently creatingbest hybrids. That was the beginning of practicing a rudimentary form of genetic engineering. Early farmers selected stronger crops, more resistant to disease, or more yielding, preserving the best of the best plant seed for the following year. They were applying the principles of plant breeding, developed later, when the laws of inheritance are discovered by Mendel who “succeeded in making sense ofheredity as he brought the precision of mathematics and physics to the subject.” Teacher, preacher and geneticist. (2003). Businessline
By the 30s the breeding led to the development of the first hybrid crops, resulting in a large increase in production. It was not until the development of genetics and the understanding of the mechanisms of biological evolution by natural selection,that improvement was seen as well as a systematic selection of crops. It was the Green Revolution, in which the procedures were systematic and resorted to the classification of natural variability, the use of mutation, and recombination by crossing, hybridization with related species, and finally the selection of progeny. This phase culminates in the seventies of the last century, leading to theproduction of plants, often hybrid, with features such as larger fruit, higher nutrient content, faster growth, and so on.
As a result, high productivity plants were obtained, very homogeneous, sometimes sterile, with clear advantages from the point of view of production and agriculture based on modern and economical technologies. The downside of this approach soon appeared: first, becausethese crops usually require fertilizers and pesticides, and secondly, because the technology was in the hands of developed countries. So the third world countries were increasing their crops, sometimes very significantly, but at the cost of becoming economically and technologically dependent on rich countries. Besides a new negative effect emerged: genetic erosion, or the loss of geneticvariability that occurs in many species cultivated agriculturally in the dependent countries to be displaced by foreign high productivity.
Every nation has the right to control and decide when it comes to its food, controlling the production chain in order to obtain independency in this regard. This is an important reason why some societies reject the use of transgenic foods, among many otherstightly related. It is important to point out the multiplicity of reasons in order to avoid misinterpretation under the simplicity that it is only “fear of new things” or “rejection of the technology”. Genetic engineering has many risks. There are people playing to be God in laboratories, manipulating viruses, bacteria, plants and animals. This experimentation with everything alive, entailsunimaginable risks with the possible creation of new pathogens and diseases.
Threats to the environment have been proven with the contamination of the corn in Mexico, in its own origin in 2004. “The corn GMO deluge in Mexico is virtually irreversible as contamination may be currently happening on a massive scale. In the Philippines, it may not be too late if the government imposed a...