Genetically Modified Organism (GMO)

In the United States, there are around 2 million farms. 75% of the US’s farms are GM`1O-producing farms, meaning that they are farms that produce Genetically Modified Organisms, which are crops made in labs to be better for agriculture. This means that around a 1.5million farms produce GMOs. On average, 1 farm produces enough food to feed 155 people. 1 American eats nearly 1 ton per year. 1 farm produces about 155 times a ton, so 155 tons. Farms produce 1.5million times 155 tons of GMOs, which is about 232.5 million tons of GMO produced per year. The Statue of Liberty is 200 tons. The amount of GMOs produced by Americans is roughly a million Statue of Liberties. With this amount of GMO crops produced, it is expected for them to be beneficial and productive. However, I believe that, unlike the intentions, the conclusions were not as beneficial, but rather harmful.

The creation and usage of GMOs first were intended to help and be beneficial for all people. They were created to make agriculture much easier. However, that didn’t work out as planned. GMOs have done nothing but stir up negative impacts on the environment. They have caused much damage in the past, and they will keep on doing so.

For millenniums, the human race has depended on agriculture as one of their most primary food sources. Since then, people have been always altering the genes of crops, trying to make better crops by mixing the two previously best crops. However, the recent increase of population and stable living society has increased both the demands on quality and quantity. People started to find a new way than simply farm crops and see what happened; they needed an agricultural revolution. The altering of genes took too much time and the success rate was too low for it to be a dependable way to reach these demands.

The first major development was made in 1973 when Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen worked to create the world’s first GMO from bacteria. Since then, numerous major developments were made and this later led to the grand utilizing of GMOs on everyday farms nowadays in more than 70 countries in the world, including the United States.

The United States is the nation with the most GMOs nowadays. This is mainly due to the overall scale of the farms in the United States, and since it is one of the 70 or more countries that grow GMOs. Farms and vegetations in the US are mostly GMO-based farms. GMOs were created to resist insects, droughts, and disease, which were directly a problem to the crops. To resist weeds, GMOs also developed a trait to be immune and invulnerable against herbicides. To raise the overall quality of crops, they also gained more nutrition and grew faster. These unnatural benefits of GMOs made lots of farms adopt this new type of crop for their agriculture, leading to the major expansion of GMOs. Over time, GMOs looked successful. There were some arguments that GMOs were unsafe for health, but these issues were quickly calmed by the numerous scientific articles proving the safety of GMOs. However, the problem was not on safety. People were mostly seen as the only stakeholders of this issue. The problem was that this was not the case. The environment was also a stakeholder. GMOs led to multiple problems, those consisting of loss of biodiversity, contamination, and the rise of pests. For the problem to be solved, awareness must be raised. However, in a conducted survey, ⅓ of the sample was unaware of any type of GMOs. Most of the problems that GMOs hoped to solve were either worsened, unsolved, or had only seen minor progress.

One of the biggest traits of GMOs that has led to these problems is herbicide and pesticide resistance. This led to first, contamination. With the knowledge that herbicides and pesticides can no longer harm their crop, farmers began to use these toxic chemicals a lot. Our survey resulted that 11 out of 30 students have witnessed the use of pesticides recently. The overuse of herbicides and pesticides led to some of the chemicals escaping the farm and contaminating groundwater, soil, and other bodies of water. These contaminations caused the illness of humans, the creation of ocean “Dead Zones”, and e.t.c.

The second problem that arose due to herbicides was the evolution of pests. Herbicides were widely used to eradicate weeds from farms. However, some weeds survived to reproduce. The newborn weeds gained immunity to the herbicides its parent had suffered, and therefore, became superweed. A superweed is a type of weed that is resistant to usual herbicides like Roundup. These superweeds started to take over farms and destroyed whole crops. GMOs that were created to resist weeds created the strongest weed of all. However, people just couldn’t stand and watch as their crops died out. They started to use more powerful herbicides that were more toxic. The herbicides worked for a while, killing the superweeds, but later, the weeds adapted again. This process repeated, causing a chemical war between weeds and humans. This may sound silly, but it is becoming a big problem in agriculture. The use of more toxic herbicides further enlarged the previous problem of contamination.

The final problem is biodiversity loss. This problem’s source is different from the previous problems. A particular type of GMO is engineered to resist pests differently. Some GMOs are engineered to possess the traits of bacterias that produce toxic materials. A big example of this bacteria is bacillus thuringiensis. Bacillus thuringiensis has a toxin that kills pests but is harmless to us. GMOs that have these bacteria’s traits have Bacillus thuringiensis’s toxins in their cells which causes pests to die when they eat the plant. However, the problem is that pests aren’t the only thing they kill. They are also a reason that important pollinators such as butterflies and bees die. The death of these organisms causes critical damage to the whole ecosystem, and may unbalance the food web and/or chain.