TRANSGENIC FOODS: Safety within these
Transgenic foods are increasingly present in our lives. It is enough to take a walk through the supermarket and approach the area of fruits and vegetables to realize a reality, all the vegetables seem clones of themselves: tomatoes with the same intense red, apples of exact size, watermelons without nuggets … but,,How can your consumption affect us?
What are transgenic foods?
It is true that all these foods are very healthy but their origin can doubt its benefits. Transgenic foods are the product of a modification by genetic engineering, which have been incorporated a gene from another organism to achieve certain characteristics. Currently, most of these altered characters are aimed at increasing the production of these foods:
- Herbicide resistance: in this way it is possible to use them so that they only affect the plants outside the crop.
- Survival against one or several species of insects with which the use of insecticides decreases.
- Resistance to droughts: It is possible to create varieties with lower water needs and enable their cultivation in dry areas.
Although all these processes are very controlled by the World Health Organization (WHO) that ensures that: all these crops for both human and animal consumption are as safe as conventional ones. Today, there are still many detractors of its use for human consumption.
Pros and cons of transgenic foods
Being fair, man has been selecting species for both cultivation and livestock since we abandon nomadism. And biotechnology, in this case, what it does is take these genetic selection processes one step further. What postures defend or disapprove of transgenic foods?.
Advantages of transgenics
Your plantation does not imply a risk to your environment. Recently, a study by the University of Barcelona has shown that if both crops, conventional and transgenics, are planted at a distance of 30 meters and 11 days apart, there will be no transfer from each other.
FAO (Organization for Agriculture and Food), on the other hand, sent in one of its reports: the countries that have introduced these crops have reduced the use of pesticides, thus reducing environmental and soil pollution.
WHO says that after multiple studies and strict controls on such products for human consumption, no risks to human health have been detected.
They are a solution to hunger in the world. Richard Roberts, biochemist and Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1993 highlighted in this regard: the invention of ‘gold rice’, which includes vitamin A in its composition, will provide the necessary nutrition of children from developing countries.
Disadvantages of transgenics
One of the greatest critics of transgenic foods is the Greenpeace group due, mainly, to the loss of biodiversity that these foods suppose. The problem does not lie so much in its danger, not demonstrated, for human consumption but to the use of them. The production of transgenic seeds, a business that moves millions a year, produces mostly sterile plants, which is necessary to buy every season of new remittances.
Monsanto Company, multinational producer of agrochemicals and biotechnology for agriculture, is one of the most powerful companies in the sector. According to Greenpeace, it has the patent that covers all transgenic soybeans:
If a farmer buys his seeds resistant to a specific herbicide, he must also acquire its herbicide or concrete chemicals to activate the desired characteristics.
Another factors is its negative environmental impact since these techniques do not favor sustainable agriculture or the development of local models based on the use of fertile native varieties. This opens a constitutional debate on the protection of traditional cultivation system that respect natural selection in seed production and control by a few companies in world agriculture.
summarizing
The controversy that surrounds transgenic foods is not as focused on their safety as economic aspects. What seems to worry associations such as Greenpeace is more, perhaps, the hands that control the wealth that this new technology generates expanding the social gap in developing countries. Of course, that any genetic alteration in the laboratory can have unpredictable consequences that these products are subject to strict health controls.
Children in Africa have no option. As a society we should not have the right to decide what foods are ‘bad or dangerous’ given the conditions in which the global famine is located.
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