We explain what transgenic foods are and what genetic modifications are for. In addition, its advantages and criticisms.
What are transgenic foods?
GM foods are organisms genetically engineered plants and other techniques of bioengineering, in order to give it new properties and achieve more resistant, abundant crops and / or with larger products.
Transgenic foods are obtained as part of projects to improve the species, just no longer through methods traditional of natural selection or hybridization (whose products are usually sterile), but by inserting genes from a similar species into the species, to introduce concrete changes in the reproduction of the species.
The first transgenic plant produced was born in 1983 and three years later the business multinational Monsanto already marketed it. It was a tobacco plant that had a gene inserted to make it resistant to the antibiotic Kanamycin. In 1994 the Calgene company began marketing the first product transgenic: Flavr Savr tomatoes.
This type of genetic modification techniques are currently applied with corn and soybeans, among other vegetables from consumption massive, through the sale of transgenic seeds "manufactured" by large agrotechnology corporations. The five countries with the highest amount (almost 95%) of genetically modified organisms (GMO) produced are Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina and China.
Criticisms of GM foods
The food industry transgenics to commercialize unsafe foods, with greater allergenicity or toxicity. The research of Exwen and Pustzai from 1999, in which they fed two groups of rats with natural and transgenic potatoes respectively, showing a greater deterioration in the case of the latter. However, flaws in experimental procedures and designs incurred by these scientists discredited their results.
The results regarding the eventual long-term toxicity of genetically modified foods are contradictory and inconclusive. However, this is not the only concern in this regard.
A controversial point regarding transgenic foods has to do with the gradual replacement of natural strains by those intervened by man, whose artificially induced resistance would give it unfair advantages to compete with wild strains. This would eventually lead to the impoverishment of the genetic pool and, furthermore, involves complicated intellectual property issues, which would force farmers to pay royalties to the company that supplies them with the transgenic seeds.
Advantages of transgenic foods
The genetically induced advantages of this type of food have to do not only with the achievement of larger and larger species cost effectiveness, which could serve to combat hunger in a world of increasingly population human; but also with obtaining plants more resistant to pests and other substances for agricultural use.
This would allow the intensive cultivation of plant species and the increase in production and distribution in local and regional markets. The United Nations for Food and Agriculture estimates that due to the climate change the productivity agriculture would decrease between 9 to 12% by 2050. GM foods could be a way to combat the coming famine.