More on the Safety of GMO Crops and Subsequent Foods

Recently, I came across one of the most concise articles that I have seen dealing with the safety of genetically engineered (GE) crops (click here). The author of the article is Dr. Joseph Perrone, chief science officer at the Center for Accountability in Science.

In the article, Dr. Perrone quotes from a review article titled “An overview of the last 10 years of genetically engineered crop safety research” published in Critical Reviews in Biotechnology. The following points from that review article authored by Nicolia, Manzo, Veronesi, and Rosellini deserve special attention.

1.   Global food production must face challenges from climate change, population growth, and competition for arable lands.

2.   Healthy foods have to be produced with reduced environmental impact and with less input from non-renewable resources.

3.   GE crops could be an important tool in support of point 2, but their release into the environment and their adoption in agricultural systems has raised concerns about environmental impact and food/feed safety.

4.   The scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of genetically modified crops.

5.   When working with the “hot issue” of GE crops, researchers should take special care to follow rigorous scientific standards and avoid publication of data not sufficiently peer-reviewed by the scientific community.

6.   An improvement in the efficacy of scientific communication to stakeholders could have a significant impact on the future of GE crops in agriculture.

7.   And finally, the authors believe that genetic engineering and GE crops should be considered important options in the efforts toward sustainable agricultural production.

The above seven points provide a very concise summation of the issues and facts that support the use of GE crops in agriculture.

The naysayers who use scare tactics to cause the public to wrongly assume that foods from GE crops are not safe to eat are doing a terrible disservice to the global community as a whole, and to the undernourished specifically, with their continued unfounded rhetoric that places an unwarranted onus on GE crop technology and its future contribution to the issue in point one above.

Composed by Larry G. Heatherly, July 2015, larryheatherly@bellsouth.net