Advantage And Disadvantages Of Using GMO Crops

Introduction:
The year is 2018, and at this point the world has scene massive growth and expansion in the fields of science and technology. As technology improves, so does science, leading to a boom of new and exiting frontiers in the field of biotechnology. One of the fruits of this development are GMO foods, a strangely controversial product. Simply put, a GMO is any produce which has had it’s DNA altered via genetic engineering. Despite some skepticism, some crops are composed of over 90% being GMO. This is a massive percentage, and only continues to rise. As people are very careful and cautious about what they put in their bodies, there have been many studies conducted on various GMOs, let us take a look at them to determine if they are

Increasing the size of the crop allows it to produce more edible mass, as well as become more profitable. This has the secondary effect of lowering the amount of land needed to farm, and in a world where the population consumes 11,000,000 pounds of food everyday and is increasing exponentially, this is extremely important, as razing forests to build more farm land is harmful to the environment. Another advantage to using GMO crops is the ability to ward off insects which would destroy them. This is done in two ways, either giving the plant the ability to produce pesticide, or by giving the plant immunity to a toxin which will kill everything else around it. GMO crops are also cheaper than their organic counterparts, largely due to their increased size and the fact that they require less management, like pesticide treatment. The lack of pesticide, which is actually known to harm humans, produces a healthier product. Any GMOs which are engineered to produce their own pesticide produce toxin which is only harmful to certain insects, and not to humans, and so they are harmless. This is not to say that scientists could not make a harmful GMO crops, they have the capacity to do so, however any new crop which is meant to be consumed by humans goes through extensive testing by numerous agencies including the USDA, the FDA, and the EPA. After these tests the crop is either approved or denied, and only if it is approved and deemed safe is it allowed to be sold to the