For this audience, the potential advantages of GM crops are well known:
1. Herbicide tolerance, allowing for fewer herbicide applications 2. resistance to insects and pests. 3. Resistance to bacteria, fungi, and viruses. 4. Resistance to abiotic stress. 5. Enrichment in micronutrients.
How many underdeveloped nations particularly benefit from these advantages? The pertinent argument goes like this. Over the past 60 years, food production in the industrialized world has kept pace with population increase. This was also true for a large portion of Asia and Latin America, where the Green Revolution's advantages were felt. However, there was little improvement in agricultural output in Africa and several regions of Asia, and poverty continued. Furthermore, considering that two-thirds of the world's poor live in rural regions and rely on agriculture, there is a strong argument for putting an emphasis on agricultural development, especially as increases in agricultural output help to create jobs and raise wages.
Genetically modified (GM) crops have generated a great deal of controversy. The use of biotechnology in agriculture has caused major ideological and scientific concerns that continue to be echoed in the media and academic press. Since commercially introduced to farmers in 1996, the global area cultivated with GM crops has increased 94-fold, from 1.7 million hectares to 160 million hectares in 2011.
The moral objection to genetically modified food and food products is indifferent to economic concerns. The moral objection is that it is wrong to put poison in people’s food. That objection is completely wrong on the facts, but the facts seem to make no difference to those with a moral objection. Their real concern is with the loss of control over their lives, which is a valid concern, but wrongly applied here.
GM food can provide more food at a lower cost and so has the potential to address global hunger. That economic fact carries moral weight. Nevertheless, protesters are correct that we have enough food to feed the world now but do not. It comes down to distribution issues and money. Starving people cannot pay for the food. So, GM food is no cure-all for world hunger, but it is one factor in the equation.
About half of Americans see no difference between GM and other foods, while a sizable minority say GM foods are a health risk.
A number of observers have suggested that Americans’ limited familiarity with genetically modified foods suggests that people’s opinions about GM are “soft” and, therefore, more likely to change over time and, potentially, to be sensitive to differences in survey question-wording.
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