Before I dive into this controversial topic, I want to be very clear. I am NOT against agriculture or our farmers. Agriculture runs deep in my veins - I majored in agriculture in college and worked in the agriculture industry until several years ago. I support American farmers as much as I can. Especially the small, local farmers. I saw what NAFTA did in the 1990's to the tomato growers in Hillsborough county where I was raised. I have witnessed first hand how urban development destroys agriculture, as the orange groves and strawberry fields around me turned into houses and shopping centers. Today, I live in a small farming community where certain times of the year, I get caught behind a tractor, combine, or peanut wagon going down the highway. I am thankful for those moments - because here, agriculture is still alive. If it were not for our American farmers, there would not be any American grown food in the grocery store.
The purpose of this article is to help the consumer understand what Genetically Modified (GM) foods are, the benefit to the farmer, and their affect on the body from a nutritional standpoint. My resources for the information in this article are listed at the bottom.
First, let's look at what GM foods are. GM is short for genetically modified. You may also see them referred to as genetically engineered. The most common is Roundup Ready corn and soybean. These seeds are engineered in the lab to be immune to the effects of Round-up, so farmers can then spray this non-selective weed killer on crops that it would normally damage or kill.
There are two ways crops are genetically modified. RNA interference where specific genes causing undesirable traits are silenced, and transgenics where the recipient crop or species receives a desirable trait it would not have otherwise. With Bt and Round-up Ready (RR) crops, the latter is the method used.
In researching information for this article I came across a great explanation of the trangenics process on GMOanswers.com. This comes directly from an article on their website.
"What genetics were put into GM corn, and what do they do? The type of genes that are
added to genetically modified corn generally fall under three categories: herbicide tolerance,
insect protection and finally drought stress protection. They can also be enzymes that
regulate specific metabolic pathways, like herbicide tolerance or a functional protein, like the
Bt proteins.
Here is more detail on Roundup Ready crops, which are tolerant to glyphosate:
Glyphosate specifically inhibits an enzyme, EPSPS (most growing plants produce this protein)
that is essential to plant growth; this enzyme is not found in humans or animals. When
sprayed with Roundup agricultural herbicides - or any herbicide that contains glyphosate as
the active ingredient - these plants will not synthesize certain aromatic amino acids required
for growth. The end result is that these plants will die and thus not compete for the resources
on a farmer’s field with crops. Scientists were able to find a form of the gene naturally
occurring in a bacterium which was fully functional to make the amino acids, but it was not
inhibited by glyphosate. This particular gene was introduced into the genome of the
Roundup Ready crops to make them tolerant to glyphosate. So even though the native form
of the crop’s enzyme is inhibited when sprayed with glyphosate, the introduced gene allows
the amino acids to be synthesized and the plant is not affected by glyphosate agricultural
herbicides. Here is a link to a technical publication that explains all the details."
American GMO foods are regulated by the USDA, EPA, and the FDA. In 1992, the FDA determined that GM crops are "substantially equivalent" to non-GMO crops. This determination allows the FDA to regulate GM and non-GM foods the same, and gives all GM foods GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status.
Not all genetically modified foods have been edited for glyphosate or Bt tolerance. Some are modified to resist certain devastating viruses, such as the papaya and summer squash. The papaya industry in Hawaii was under severe threat from a ringspot virus that hit the island in the 1940's, threatening to destroy that industry by the 1990's. To combat the virus, scientists and researchers used a new technology that enabled them to take a genetic sequence of the virus and insert it into the papaya genome. These new plants were then able to resist the ringspot virus - saving the papaya industry in Hawaii. Similarly, summer squash was being devastated by the effects of two viruses - the zucchini yellow mosaic virus and watermelon mottle virus 2. By the early 1990's, Asgrow seed company had developed modified varieties resistant to these viruses using the same method as with the papaya. In 1995, the first GMO yellow squash were being planted, and by 1996, Asgrow had transferred the virus resistance genes to zucchini by way of conventional breeding. Asgrow developed seeds resistant to a third virus by 1998. However, the likelihood of actually consuming these GM squash is pretty slim because, when a squash is struck with a virus, it is always more than one. According to Cornell Cooperative Extension, if the plant is resistant to some viruses but not others, the farmer will still use the same control measures and will see little cost savings to offset the price of GM seeds.
As of March 2020, the genetically modified crops grown in the United States are sugar beets, canola, corn, summer squash, soybean, cotton, papaya, alfalfa, apple, and potatoes. While the variety of GM crops grown is relatively small when compared to all the crops grown across the country, some of them make up for it amount of acres grown. For example, in 2018, GM corn accounted for 92% of corn planted in the U.S. while GM soybeans made up 94% of the soybeans planted that year.
From a producer standpoint, GM crops are often a viable weapon in agriculture. They have saved crops from total failure and reduced the amount of pesticides and herbicides applied during a growing season. There has been no scientific evidence of any difference in the nutritional content of the GM food verses the non-GM food. However, the differences are much deeper than that. And this is where the controversy begins.
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