Harvest of Fear

Should we Grow GM Crops?

Instructions: Read the page and click YES or NO, reach the next...click YES or NO...etc until you’ve read all the arguments -- You will need to do this 12 times in order for your votes to be tallied. Navigate the site, each of the bold headings below are links within the site


1. What is a GM Crop.
Genetically modified foods are derived form genetically modified organisms. Genetically modified organisms have had specific changes introduced into their DNA genetic engineering techniques. GM crop farming is expanded rapidly around around the world. Global acreage of GM crop has risen 25-fold in just four years, from approximately 4.3 million acres in 1996 to about 100 million acres in 1999. Industry, government, and many academic scientists tout the benefits of GM foods for agriculture, ecosystems, and human health and well-being, including feeding a world population bursting at the seams. Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification, is the direct human manipulation of an organism's genetic make material in a way that does not occur under natural conditions. GM crops have enhanced taste an quality than naturally grown crops, their maturing time is reduced, increased nutrients, yields, and stress tolerance, improved resistance to disease, pests, and herbicides, and new products and growing techniques.


2. List 2 arguments FOR the growing of GM crops

1. What if you knew that proponents assert that GM foods will promise many health benefits?

a. GM foods will be better for us, with some products that are already working and ones that benefit our waistlines and other bearing higher nutritional content.

2. What if you knew that advocates maintain that GM technology will help the environment?

a. In the U.S. alone, farmers spray, spread, and otherwise administer more than 970 million tons of insect- and plant-killers every year. These pose threats to the environment. Pesticide residues linger on crops and in soil, find their way into the guts of wildlife that eat contaminated foliage, and leach into groundwater and wash into streams. If a crop boasts its own ability to resist invertebrate predators, then farmers can use far fewer chemicals

3. List 2 arguments AGAINST the growing of GM crops.

1. What if you knew that detractors fear that GM food might pose health risks for certain people?

a. Some people, including children, are highly allergic to peanuts, wheat, dairy, and other foods, and some critics of GM foods think that GM foods have the possibility to cause and unintentionally introduce new allergies.

2. What if you knew that opponents fear that GM crop technology will hurt small farmers?

a. Critics of GM agriculture insist that patenting genetically altered crops, as agribusiness is rushing to do, will make small farmers indentured to big firms. Monsanto, one of the biggest players in the field, is currently suing dozens of North American farmers whom it claims have raised its patented GM crops without paying for the privilege.

Engineer a Crop

4. Practice this simulation until you get the largest ears of corn. How many times did it take you?
It took me 3 times to get the largest years of corn in 4 seasons.


What’s for Dinner?
5. List two foods and desribe how they are being modified.
Pizza: For each of the ingredients you might find in pizza, including cheese, wheat, green peppers, onions, and tomatoes, scientists are testing GM varieties. They are modifying rennet, a dried extract used to curdle milk for cheese, to speed the cheese-making process, wheat used in bleached flour to be more easily digestible and produce greater yields; and green peppers, onions, and tomatoes to stay fresh longer in supermarkets, resist pests, and survive droughts.

Fruit: Plant geneticists are testing almost any fruit you can think of for your GM variety approval. Strawberries, pears, melons, apples, grapefruit, and watermelons with altered sugar content, fruit ripening cycles, and pests resistance may be hitting your local produce aisle soon.

Viewpoints
Do you think food should be labeled if it has been genetically modified? Why or Why not?

Yes, I think that genetically modified food should be labeled. The FDA refused to require labeling of genetically modified foods, against the advice of its own scientists, and I find that very alarming. Also the FDA put out a political document, not a scientific one, that said that GM foods are no different than naturally grown foods without modifiers, and therefore they don't have to be labeled to even regulated differently. Genetically modified food should be labeled because some people might have allergies to that modifier, or that modifier might cause a disease or a virus and I think that the public deserves to know what they are consuming and what their families are putting in their bodies.