Friday, June 11, 2021

Are GMO's good as we think?

 Hello and welcome to my final blog for my class food. We began this smaller unit by talking and watching a documentary about the american farmer and scientist, Norman Borlaug. He figured out a way to breed plants together to help make them more resistant to many plant diseases that sprouted up in places like Mexico and in India. We also talked about how to analyze the male and female parts of different plants that help their reproductive process. 


We did that by going into our neighborhoods and found some flowers ourselves, then we drew pictures of them. Once we drew the pictures we analyzed the male and female parts of the plants to see how Norman Borlaug was able to breed them. On our last field experience we went to a farmers market to see how different farmers produced their plants. We also got to learn about the process of organic and non GMO foods, and that's what I'll be talking about in this blog.

I don't support GMO's because they can become very toxic and it's also very expensive for low income farmers. According to Dr. David Perlmutter from alliance for science he claims that "Genetically modified (GM) crops are associated with an increased use of chemicals, like glyphosate, that are toxic to the environment and to humans. These chemicals not only contaminate our food and water supplies, but they also compromise soil quality and are actually associated with increased disease susceptibility in crops." In other words GMO based crops will always have a increase in chemicals in crops, and who would really want to have chemicals in their wheat anyway?

Now on to my next point, expenses. Not only is becoming non GMO very difficult, but pretty expensive as well. It also takes a lot of steps too.

Here are all the steps:
  1. Step 1: Select a Technical Administrator- Research a company that can help to fit your best needs.
  2. Step 2: Sign a Contract with Your Technical Administrator - sign an agreement that you have to work with them.
  3. Step 3: Sign a Non-GMO Project License Agreement - The administrator will help you to a licensed agreement  
  4. Step 4: Product Evaluation - An evaluation that you have to create yourself and gives the GMO project access to everything you grow.
  5. Step 5: Verification & Marketing Opportunities - Once your evaluation is done you get a certificate of verification from your TA (Technical Administrator) that allows you to get sponsored by the project itself
  6. Step 6: Annual Renewal - Your TA ((Technical Administrator) will review your product to see if it's good and will give you a certificate of approval and you can keep growing your crops, but your will renewal fee will be put into place.

This process is pretty long and can become very tedious for a lot of farmers, plus you have to pay a fee in order to keep your title. If your curious he the Non-GMO Project administrative product verification fee will increase from $50 per product to $70 per product you make which for lower income farmers it can become very difficult for them to pay. 

In the end some say the GMO crops are perfectly safe, and we should use them anyways in our foods. But according to  Megan L. Norris she states that once a rat fed a diet containing a GMO potato had virtually every organ system adversely affected after just ten days of feeding . The IRT stated that the toxicity was the result of genetic modification techniques and not a specific case for that particular potato. They claimed the process of making the GMO caused it to be toxic and thus all GMOs were high risk for toxicity. So we can see that GMO can be more of a harm than a help.

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