Persuasive Essay On Gm Foods

All we’ve heard about GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) is that they will poison our children, make all of us sick, and make Big Agriculture even more money while screwing over the little family owned farms. None of those claims are true, in fact GMOs can actually make people healthier and with the development of disease, pesticide, and herbicide resistant grains, fruits, and vegetables the small farmers will profit from growing these new super foods. People should not be opposed to GMOs, especially because Genetically Modified Foods can help make food cheaper and more widely available.

In the year 2000 Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer began development on a strain of rice that would give people in the third world a sustainable source of food that would provide the micronutrients they so desperately need. This project was named ‘Golden

Modern farming, though not as bad as it once was, still use processes such as plowing “The point of plowing is to kill. It wipes out perennial plants and buries seeds deeply enough that they’ll never have a chance to grow.” (Johnson) The destruction of the native flora and the erosion of exposed topsoil causes reduced soil fertility and land degradation. The main reason farmers plow their fields before planting crops is to eliminate weeds that might be growing beneath the surface that could cause decreased plant growth or prevent it all together. The development of herbicide resistant GM crops eliminate the need for plowing because the crops themselves won’t be affected by the herbicide itself. Water waste is also a big problem surrounding agriculture due to farmers growing crops that are not suited for the environments that they are being grown in, thus needing to be watered more frequently. GM crops like Golden rice are specifically able to grow in arid climates and will not need to be watered as much as their non-GM counter parts would need to be in the same