Is Genetically Modified Food essential to feed the world’s growing population?

Genetically Modified Food (GMOs) is a plant or animal that has been genetically altered by scientists to improve its ability to grow in non-native environments, resist pests, tolerate extreme weather conditions, produce more food (like milk in cows), or show other desired traits. The Topic of Genetically Modified food has been a concern in the world for years, large sums of money has been spent on this project and yet does not prove to be effective. The campaigns of GMOs usually fail, and this results into many people or animals resulting in death. For example, the death of Bees in North America caused by the introduction of GMOs corns. So is GMOs really needed to feed the world growing population? I strongly believe that GMOs will not help feed the world growing population, but will rather cause a negative effect such as leading to global famine and hunger.

I believe that the problem of the hunger in the world is not due to inadequate food supply but the unevenly distribution of food in the world. From the “World hunger Index” we can see that in places such as Africa the people there are classified as having "alarming" or "extremely alarming" levels of hunger. On the other hand people in Europe as facing a low hunger level. From the Index we could see a pattern that if a country is rich and developed, that country will show low levels of hunger. This is because the distribution of food is uneven between the rich and the poorer countries. Countries which are poorer can’t afford to import as much food. In addition, people in these countries wouldn’t be able to afford to buy those imported food anyways. So this leads to high levels of hunger in the poorer countries. If the problem is that the poorer countries cannot afford normal food how would they actually afford GMOs food? Since GMOs food is more expensive than normal food, I don’t think that GMOs is the answer to this hunger crisis. I think that instead of spending lots of money on GMO project. Countries like Africa should spend money on improving their technology to produce more food to feed their population.

The Most well-known GMOs project is the “golden rice” which has beta-carotene, which can be converted in Vitamin A for a normal person. Nearly a million children die every year because of vitamin A deficiency and an additional 350,000 go blind. The “golden rice” project was aimed to solve this huge crisis. However, instead of developing further on the “golden rice” project the government spends over 82 million dollars on advertising that “biotech food will solve world hunger”. But, In fact the result was that biotech didn’t solve world hunger. The “golden rice” projected had a downside to it. Golden rice needed lots of fertilizers, pesticides and large amount of water to grow in. This is a problem because in areas where Vitamin A deficiency is a problem, farmers cannot afford this costly irrigation project. This means that many people will still die because of vitamin deficiency just because they cannot afford to buy and plant these amazing GM seeds and also pay the irrigation cost, which makes this project pretty much useless to the poor.

There are more than 1.7 billion people who are obese and around 870 million people who suffer each day from hunger. From this figures we can conclude that there’s more people who have more than enough food than people who cannot afford food. So why are people facing hunger? The problem is not people not having enough food; I strongly believe that Poverty is the root of the problem of this hunger crisis. Peter Rosset, director of Food First says about the “golden rice” project that "People do not have

Vitamin A deficiency because rice contains too little Vitamin A, but because their diet has been reduced to rice and almost nothing else." From this quote we can conclude that people are just not having enough money so they end up having malnutrition or starve.

In conclusion I believe that GMOs does not help feed the world growing population. Joshua Muldavin, a geography professor at Sarah Lawrence College who focuses on food and agricultural instruction said that “We have two or three times the amount of food right now that is needed to feed the number of people in the world," I believe that the problem isn’t about the amount of food in the world but the distribution of food as I mentioned earlier in my argument. If the world can somehow spread food evenly across the world nobody would starve. But, the problem is the money. Some countries, mostly developing countries experience shortage or money which leads to poverty and therefor there is less food and more hunger in that country. I still believe that introducing GMOs will not have any effect on feeding the growing population if we cannot yet solve the evenly distribution of money in the world. I believe the GMOs don’t benefit the poor at all since they cannot afford it. I think that the world growing technology can be able to produce enough food for the world , and that GMOs is not essential to feed the world growing population.