The Gmo Debate - Safety of Genetically Modified Corn as Aid for the South African Famine

The GMO debate- Safety of Genetically Modified Corn as aid for the South African famine

Aadit Shah

In this important GMO debate, I am Linda Thrane, the executive director of the council for biotechnology information (also known as the CBI). I am a supporter of the pro-GMO faction. I have made it one of the CBIs goals to convince the African nations to accept the food aid provided by the US.

I have worked as Vice President of public affairs in Cargill, Inc, directing their corporate communications and crisis management. Prior to this, I was an editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and have served as associate director for the Minneapolis Petroleum Council. I have also worked as a reporter with the United Press International’s St. Paul bureau. I joined as director for the CBI in 2000. The CBI is a nonprofit North American organization dedicated to communicating scientific information about the safety and advantages of biotechnology in agriculture. It is a coalition of several life-science companies including Monsanto. It is currently the council’s mission to ensure that accurate information about GMOs is provided at this conference and the benefits of biotechnology are well-understood.

Southern Africa is facing a horrible food crisis, and as many as 20 million people could require food aid in the near future. With the onset of a famine, a large amount of people is dying from starvation. This famine is due to a combination of drought and flooding. The African nations require help in the form of both a short term and a long term solution. The food aid from the US consists of GM corn (BT maize), and makes up “nearly 2/3rd of the total donations” (Henderson, D. (n.d.)).

While some of the corn is genetically modified, it is necessary that it is donated. This is because even with the GMO corn, there is a shortfall in food aid according to the statistics of confirmed contributions to the Southern Africa Region through the World Food Program. Without the U.S.’s corn donation, the shortfall will more than double. In the short term, this would lead to a horrifying number of deaths from hunger. Letting the African people starve would seem barbaric when there is perfectly normal and safe GMO corn available. The safety of genetically modified corn has been repeatedly proven and the stigma, fear, and bans on such food are unreasonable.

A very large part of the anti-GMO debate is concerned with the fact that GMOs are not ‘natural’. People have been modifying crops for centuries by the process of artificial selection. An enormous part of the food plants we eat today are not available naturally in the wild. Instead, farmers have been modifying crops by selectively breeding them over a large number of years. GMO makes it much more easy to modify crops to agriculturally improve them. It opens a wider range of genes to benefit the agricultural process. This includes pesticide resistance, drought resistance, pest resistance, and flood resistance.

GMOs tend to give higher crop yields than regular crops. In the case of Bt-corn, the corn has been genetically altered to contain one or more genes from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis. This causes it to produce a protein that is poisonous to certain insect pests. In turn, this reduces damage from pests. This method has also been proven to be completely safe Genetically modified crops being planted in developing countries increase yields and reduces pest damage. These crops provide highly effective control of major pests such as the European corn borer, southwestern corn borer, tobacco budworm, cotton bollworm, pink bollworm, and Colorado potato beetle and reduce reliance on conventional chemical pesticides. Other benefits of these crops include reduced levels of the fungal toxin fumonisin. This means that the GM corn is actually safer than the unmodified corn. There is also the opportunity for supplemental pest control by beneficial insects due to the reduced use of broad-spectrum insecticides (Betz, F., Hammond, B., & Fuchs, R. (2000)). The safety to the environment and humans is supported by the long history of Bt pesticides around the world. The proteins produced by the modified corn also have been shown to rapidly degrade when crop residue is incorporated into the soil (Betz, F., Hammond, B., & Fuchs, R. (2000)). There is a strong need for government to engage with the public, providing information on their activities and decisions and listening to their concerns.