GM crops can help fight hunger — depending on how they are farmed Premium

Genetically modified crops offer sustainable solutions to food production challenges, but long-term effects on health and environment remain uncertain.

The world’s population is growing and more people need more food. But indiscriminately expanding agricultural land and practice is not desirable. Cutting forests to plant more crops will only push already-fragile ecosystems over the edge. Dousing fields with pesticides is similarly toxic and depletes soils and groundwater.

The genetically modified (GM) crops provide a way out. In the 1990s, researchers found a way to modify a plant’s genome and make specific changes that prevented insects from eating them. In the Bt cotton grown in India and Bt brinjal in Bangladesh, scientists added a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis to the plants’ genomes, making them produce a toxin that kills some insects.

Weeds threaten farms but spraying herbicides to kill them may kill the crops as well. Now there are herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops immune to some weed-killing substances, helping farmers kill the weeds alone. Researchers can also modify crops to have higher yield and/or more nutrients, reducing the need to plant more crops.

The advent of GM crops has helped farmers practise sustainable methods while increasing food production. But depending on the kind of GM crops being grown, there are still broader, longer term effects. Frederik Noack, an economist at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, and others delved into the scientific literature surrounding how farming GM crops may affect human health and the environment.

Their review, published in Science in August, said there are negligible adverse health effects of actually consuming GM crops whereas the farming methods have complex effects.

“What’s complicated about GMs is you’re not just adding a new genetic organism, you’re also adding a whole suite of management changes that come along with it,” Risa Sargent, an ecologist at UBC and one of the review’s authors, said. “The evidence is that those management changes are the risk, not the genetics of the organism per se.”

The use of insecticide-resistant crops, like ones with the Bt toxin trait, has shown low levels of risk and resulted in farmers spraying less insecticides.