2009+World+History+Final+Project+D+Janet

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[[image:tomato320.jpg align="right"]] **Table of Content**

 * About the World Food Crisis


 * About GM Food


 * Environmental Benefit


 * Economical Benefit


 * Advocate

[[image:famine_lying.jpg width="310" height="239" align="left" caption="picture of an African who is suffering from famine"]]
About the WORLD FOOD CRISIS

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These days, people who live in developing countries, in general, do not have enough food to eat. Why is such event happening? It is because of the growing human population that causes overpopulation, use of bio-fuel that raises food price and natural disasters that are exacerbated by global warming. This problem, which is called ‘the World Food Crisis’, must be solved due to its devastating effects: innumerable death and diseases caused by starvation or malnutrition. Because of these consequences of the World Food Crisis, experts have come up with numerous solutions. Amongst a few resolutions, the most debate-provoking one is Genetically Modified (GM) food. ======

What is ‘genetically modified’ food? GM food means agricultural products that are artificially inserted with other organisms’ genes in order to make crops resist diseases, herbicides and insects. In the past, most people were against GM food because it is not naturally grown. Opponents of GM food say that it is impossible to eat MUTANT-PRODUCTS that resist bugs and herbicides because they believe that GM food is not reliable due to the lack of research. They claim that there are possibilities of GM food causing problems to consumers. However, it is beginning to be accepted by many countries because GM food effectively enhances the amount of food in the same area of land and, thus, GM food is a dependable resolution for the World Food Crisis. Despite the disadvantages and the fact that I personally am not for GM food, I acquiesce to use GM food because currently, there is no other better way to prevent numerous death caused by lack of food.

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I believe that GM food should be utilized for a few reasons and one reason would be for the environment. The use of GM food can abate the amount of pesticide used in agriculture; for example, when farming GM food, Australian farmers had already decreased 50% of the amount of pesticide they annually used (//Conversations about plant biotechnology//). This is environmentally advantageous since the less pesticide we use, the less land-pollution there would be. Another example of GM food being environmentally friendly would be GM food reducing the amount of tillage, which is “preparation of land for growing crops” (//Oxford English Dictionary//), and the amount of plowing. The implement of GM food, also, would decrease a million ton of soil erosion. Thus, to protect our environment, it is critical tha GM food be used. ======

Economical Benefit
media type="custom" key="3874679"  The second reason is the price of GM food being much more  economical than naturally grown food. As shown in the graph on the right, the food price is continuously increasing. Hence, the low price of GM food benefits poor countries like Africa to feed their poverty-stricken people. According to the video presented above spoken by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs who is the director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, Africans cannot buy and produce enough food for people to eat due to extreme poverty and natural disasters like droughts. One of the solutions t o that problem would be biotechnology since it would improve agriculture by making plants adapt to the environment and have lower price at the same time (Sachs). Therefore, African scientists say, "This really fits our needs. This technology is so powerful because it brings in one little seed everything that is needed, the seeds are great deliver y. The great news is those technology exists, getting those technology to the poorest farmers is absolutely one of the keys to making the breakthrough to extreme poverty (//Economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs on Biotechnology//)."

Advocates

From farmers to scientists, advocates of GM food are constantly revising their analysis concerning the impact of GM food because it becomes essential to feed the growing population. Conclusively, it appears that GM food represents a real alternative to feeding an ever increasing population in the world. In the last two years, with food prices rising significantly and because the global population will outstrip the world’s capacity to grow food, the development of GM food is becoming crucial to a growing and hungry world population. According to AgBioWorld, 13.3 million farmers, who are 90% of the farmers of developing countries, would rather farm and cultivate bio-tech crops than natural crops because they can produce greater volumes of various crops and gain larger profits for their effordts. Accordingly, if you look at the map on the left, all of the colored nations are countries that are basically supporters of GM food; here, countries that are colored allow growing bio-tech and approve import of GM food or research field trials

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Conclusion ======  In conclusion, although there are still legitimate concerns associated with GM food, I believe that the benefits outweigh these concerns. The production of GM food will improve the environment by abating the amount of pesticides farmers use, enable the farmers to produce crops more economically, and feed the growing world population. People of developing countries, such as Sudanese or Congolese, are dying due to malnutrition and starvation that is caused by extreme poverty. Obviously, this has to end. According to Albert Weale, the chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and Professor of Government at the University of Essex, UK, one of the reliable solutions for this crisis is GM food (//Cosmos//). Should we, then, stop people from developing and using GM food because it has the potential to bring negative result when, in reality, the GM food can solve global problems like environmental devastation, World Food Crisis, and Food Inflation, which results in saving many lives?