Between Hybrids and GMOs
One popular debate that is likely not to go away any time soon is the safety of GMOs - I mean Genetically Modified Organisms. These organisms have come to stay and play important roles in our lives, including the survival of human populations. Just like anti-vaxxers, there are people or even organizations that are actively campaigning against GMOs despite their numerous usefulness. Their reasons border around several proven and unproven concerns, ranging from ethical, and health, to social economic concerns.
Environmentally, GMOs can lead to reduced biodiversity, the development of resistant pests and weeds, and unintended harm to non-target species. This view is further reinforced by the recent literature conducted by Nayab, 2024. The health risks from GMOs involve the potential for allergenicity, gene transfer, and the unknown long-term effects on human health. These risks, even though largely unproven, are overexaggerated by the anti-GMOs crusaders and for the primary basis for their movement. Socio-economic concerns include the monopolization of the seed industry by a few large corporations, which can negatively impact small farmers, and ethical issues related to the manipulation of genetic material.
While some of the concerns against GMOs remain valid, do they trump the several benefits that GMOs offer? What alternatives can be proposed? These are the questions I usually ask the anti-GMOs folks. Indeed, the concerns cannot just be waved away; efforts can be made by investing in research to limit the negative sides.
In answering the question of the alternatives that can be proposed, many of the anti-GMOs advocates that I have interacted with proffered genetic hybrids in the place of GMOs. My argument against this option has always been the same. First, genetic hybrids cannot totally replace GMOs due to the precision and specificity offered by genetic engineering. GMOs enable exact modifications at the genetic level, allowing for the introduction of specific traits such as pest resistance, high yield or enhanced nutrition, which hybrids cannot achieve through traditional breeding methods.
Additionally, GMOs can be developed much faster than hybrids, as genetic engineering can introduce desired traits in a single generation, while hybrid breeding may take multiple generations. The rate at which genetically engineered organisms can be proliferated has been one of the driving forces behind the continued quest to attain food sustainability by the human populace. Even though one can argue that hybrids can also be multiplied using plant tissue culture, that would be taking the same routes (except for minor differences) as GMOs.
Furthermore, GMOs can introduce traits not possible through hybridization, like resistance to certain diseases or pests, improved nutritional content, and herbicide tolerance. They can also be engineered to adapt to specific environmental conditions, such as drought resistance, which is crucial for food security amid climate change. GMOs can enhance crop yields and reduce the need for chemical inputs more effectively than hybrids, contributing to sustainable agriculture practices.
In summary, while hybrids are beneficial for preserving genetic diversity, they cannot match the versatility and efficiency provided by GMOs in modern agriculture. If we don't want to go back to the era of hunger and malnutrition, what we should rather focus on is tackling the concerns posed by GMOs rather than trying to eradicate them. If you are one of those who think that hybridization should be given enough attention to exploit it for food sustainability, know that hybrids and hybrid formation come with their own genuine concerns as well. Today is just not the day I will talk about that.
What do you think?
I haven't heard much about genetically modified organisms, I would read more on that, it was in fact a surprise when I read about genetically modified babies just a few months ago. But considering the benefits you have outlined, I also think it shouldn't be eradicated, why not work on the weakness instead.
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There are some issues with GMOs that are very soluble with technological advance. However, the main problem I have with GMOs is why they are made most often, which is to increase their resistance to herbicides. This is done so that much stronger doses of herbicides can be applied to fields where they are grown - and the produce then is much more strongly tainted with glyphosate, which is at alarming levels in the environment, in people, and even found in the cord blood of newborns in the Arctic where no herbicides are applied.
We need to transform agriculture and replace our dependence on Big Ag with DIY, IMHO. By creating personal gardens and particularly by deploying aquaculture and vertical farming at home we dramatically reduce the need for biocides, and improve a number of other metrics, such as food security, nutritional quality, and many more. Problems GMOs have with horizontal gene transfer, which enables pests to gain resistance, with allergenicity, and others are greatly reduced with DIY/decentralized production, and additional technological advances are potential to further reduce such issues when the bulk of the problems are resolved through decentralization.
Thanks!
I love how you thoroughly put it. How about a combination of GMOs and organic farming? I mean, do we really need to use chemicals such as herbicides when cultivating GM crops? If we focus more on pest-resistant crops, we can jettison pesticides as well.
This is exactly the point of aquaponics/vertical farming. In such controlled environments weed seeds are almost completely excluded inherently, and herbicides are utterly unnecessary. There are some compelling reasons to use genetic modification, and these reasons all scale down to DIY/decentralized production, particularly when looking at creating customized nutritional profiles of specific crops. For example, someone with a vitamin A deficiency due to an inherited trait or birth defect can enhance the vitamin A productivity of a strain of carrots they grow, and resolve their nutritional defect with bespoke produce, rather than pills and Big Pharma.
In vertical farms pests that prey on crops are as inherently excluded as are weeds, so the energy crops have to devote to pest resistance can be used instead to improve the quality of the crop, increase sweetness, size, or other meaningful metrics for that crop. All the modifications of tender crops that cause them to be able to be mass produced similarly require plants to devote their resources to producing those traits, and by producing our food where we eat instead, the bruising resistance, ability to be ripened during transit, and etc. do not need to be invested in by crops, which can instead be extremely tender, ripen on the vine, etc. Where crops are grown in bespoke personal environments for our exclusive use instead of commercially in bulk for trade purposes, horizontal gene transfer is eliminated from concern, as are most of the reasons Big Ag modifies crops. Instead of such costly development, DIY crops can devote a much larger percentage of their development resources into improving eating quality of the crop, and GMO enhanced crops inherently have far fewer drawbacks, and much greater benefit to consumers.