• Question: Do you thing GM foods are the answer to mass production to solve food shortages?

    Asked by spacenut1982 to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      There’s no doubt that GM foods could increase food production by making crops more hardy and able to grow in places they can’t grow now… people are worried about them though because once they’re introduced in practice, you can’t easily stop contamination between the GM crop genes and the natural wild genes of surrounding crops. Then, you don’t know how that would affect the local environment… Most likely it would be fine but if it later turned out that there was a big flaw with the GM foods we wouldn’t able to fix it if those faulty genes had got out into wild populations…
      So, i think they might be an answer but we also have to be really careful how we use them and where they are introduced….

    • Photo: Jess Bean

      Jess Bean answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      The thing with GM foods is that humans have been genetically modifying their foods for hundreds, if not thousands of years. One of my dad’s favourite examples of this is in the beginning sequence of the film “Gladiator”. The scene shows a pretty melancholy Russell Crowe walking through a field of wheat that comes up to just below his knees. My dad always loves to point out that in the Roman times wheat never would have been that short. It would have come up to his hip.
      Now this kind of thing only appeared because farmers themselves decided to grow the best kinds of crop that were the shortest, biggest or tastiest. And this was all due to taking those plants with those qualities any only groning them, not the runty ones. This is exactly what genetic modification is!

    • Photo: Steven Gardner

      Steven Gardner answered on 22 Jun 2013:

      They have great potential, we have to be very careful though. Humans have had quite a lot of disasters when we’ve messed with the natural order!

Comments

  • Photo: spacenut1982

    spacenut1982 commented on :

    Do you think that ethically it could be a viable solution??

    • Photo: Christina

      Christina commented on :

      Yes i do, as long as sufficient testing on the possible impact on the environment was done. And Jess is right – we’ve been modifying crops for ages by selective breeding (and animals come to that). The only danger with GM stuff is that you make those genetic changes more quickly and so you don’t have evolution’s help to make sure what you make is viable and stable in the longer term… Jess what do you think?