GMOs are the Key to Future Food Security

In the 21st century, as we face the consequences of climate change, what will likely save us is our rapid advances in genetically modified plants and animals (GMOs) that can help sustain humanity.

One of the consequences of the Neolithic Revolution was the massive alteration of natural landscapes. Growing crops required the cutting down of forests and plowing of grasslands. Once these natural carbon sinks started to disappear, the path to anthropogenic climate change began. Clearing the land not only contributed to global warming, it also changed groundwater aquifers. Our technology allowed us to engineer rivers, build irrigation canals, create artificial lakes and ponds, and inadvertently lead to the spread of diseases like malaria. We domesticated cows, pigs, sheep, goats, camels, llamas, alpacas and horses. By turning wild animals into providers of meat and dairy, we created a methane (CH4) bomb that further contributes to global warming. The greenhouse gas (GHG) these animals produce today accounts for 14 to 18% of global emissions. Our exposure to domesticated animals has also caused pathogens inherent in them to leap into us.

Selective breeding was the accepted traditional way to perfect crops and domesticated animals. Beginning in the 1970s, however, scientists started to experiment with deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and gene expression. This led to a new scientific field of study: genetic engineering.

Genetic Engineering and GMOs

Genetic engineering has proven to be revolutionary. It has helped to create antibiotics and antivirals to fight diseases. It has led to new varieties of crops that can live in environments to which they were never adapted. We now grow GMO crops that can tolerate saline soils and withstand prolonged drought. The speed advantage of creating these new plant varieties through genetic engineering versus selective breeding has become increasingly important as global warming impacts life on Earth in the 21st century and beyond.

The first GMO foods began appearing in the 1970s. They didn’t cause environmental disruptions. They didn’t make people sick. They didn’t get labelled.  They were found in the produce departments of grocers and were ingredients incorporated into hundreds of different foods, This wasn’t to last.

Conspiracy theories are not new to the 21st century although it seems we live in an age rife with them. Near the end of the 1970s, in the absence of an open public discussion regarding the science, the fearmongers began to spread disinformation, sowing the seeds of doubt and fear and lobbying governments to ban GMOs.

Genetic engineering has been critical to the development of vaccines that have limited the number of people who died from COVID-19. Without genetic engineering along with over more than two decades of scientific research, we would never have developed and clinically tested the new mRNA and adenovirus-based vaccines that are seen as revolutionary.

Genetic engineering has been critical to the development of GMOs. Scientists have learned to combine DNA from different species to borrow traits that make domesticated animals and plants more resilient. Every GMO created involves laboratory experiments with the research published and peer-reviewed. Then the research has to be turned into a crop or product and tested. Government agencies are involved in the process which can take years before a GMO crop is released to farmers to plant, or a food product containing GMOs gets put on grocery shelves.

Precautionary Principles for New Products Minimize Risk

Consumer products can potentially pose safety risks. They go through a similar process of testing and government agency oversight. The precautionary principle looks at proportionality and risk for any new product introduced into the marketplace. That includes GMOs. The evidence from the science has to show proof that the health and environmental impacts are fully understood.

Knee-jerk responses to GMOs from regulatory bodies and governments on new crops introduced in the last several decades seem to have ignored proportionality and risk. That’s why GMO crops being grown by farmers in African countries for export, have had problems getting into European markets where regulations have exceeded the norms of precautionary principles.

This has also happened with genetically engineered drugs. One in particular, a synthetic insulin drug was shunned by many health regulatory bodies even though the biopharmaceutical manufacturer went through all the precautionary steps to ensure that the medical benefits of its engineered product over traditional insulin harvested from animal and human sources satisfied the level of risk needed for its use.

It appears that the developers of GMOs are without exception given a much harder time than let’s say, the producers of smartphones are even electric vehicles (EVs).

GMOs Need to Be Treated Equally with Other Human Inventions

If smartphones were GMOs, would they have become as ubiquitous as they are today with more than 7 billion estimated in use globally? Yet the evidence of lithium-ion chemical reactions producing instability leading to fires has been known since 1991 when a Sony laptop burst into flame.

How lithium-ion batteries made it past the precautionary principles established by government regulatory bodies is beyond my understanding. To my astonishment, there is no global database reporting battery fires. Yet between 2010 and 2019, it is estimated from U.S. sources there were over 109,000 battery fires with approximately 6,800 involving lithium-ion. These were the ones reported with some similar to one that occurred with an e-bike battery in the past week on a Toronto subway train.

Then there is the automobile. Even with government oversight that has led to safety belts, lockable fuel caps, airbags, safety brakes, safety glass and more, 1.3 million die in vehicle accidents every year.

Even the pharmaceutical industry which is subject to oversight during the development of new drugs, doesn’t get treated the same way as GMOs. Yet adverse health effects from prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States and Europe.

I would argue that smartphones, laptop computers, e-bikes automobiles and prescription drugs because of their social acceptance and convenience are not subject to the same rigorous oversight assigned to the producers of  GMOs.

Is it our lack of scientific literacy, our inability to differentiate between science fiction and fact, or our willingness to accept fearmonger “facts” that have turned GMOs into perceived safety threats? This has to end as we face growing food insecurity threats from climate change in the 21st century.