If you have ever been to America, you are likely to have eaten food containing GMOs. The first genetically-engineered food to be granted a licence for human consumption was a strain of tomato in 1994. Despite this, the risks of eating such foods are still widely misunderstood: a poll by the New York Times found that three-quarters of Americans had reservations about eating crops that had been genetically engineered. Media hype about this issue has confused many and stymied progress.

GMO simply stands for genetically modified organism, and by this definition would be used to encompass the sources of approximately two-thirds of the calories we consume. All of our major crop species have been genetically modified by humans over thousands of years via selective breeding. Selection for increased yield, ease of harvesting, and pest or disease resistance has produced plants that are unrecognisable from their wild ancestors.

As the world population continues to rise, we have had to continually up our game when it comes to producing foods efficiently. In India in the early 1960s, there was a huge threat of mass famine – nearby China was already suffering from one. The Indian government called upon Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist, who recommended the introduction of semi-dwarf crops. These increased yields and India went on to become a major rice exporter.

In the 1920s scientists began to go further than just breeding successful crop plants – they found that mutating plants using radiation could potentially produce favourable traits that could be bred back into existing crops. However, this creates ‘linkage drag’ – along with the desired trait, crossing an elite variety with a mutant is likely to introduce lots of undesirable traits into the crop, which have to be bred out over multiple generations. Genetic modification offers a solution to this: specific genes leading to desirable traits can be inserted into the genome of a crop. It is the modern solution to a problem that humans have been trying to solve through plant breeding for thousands of years – the need to produce enough food to feed the entire population.

However, GMOs face concerted opposition that was never a problem for selective or mutation breeding. Greenpeace have said a GM crop is “environmentally irresponsible, poses risks to human health, and could compromise food, nutrition and financial security”. The public perception of GMOs has not been helped by widespread publication of results from questionable studies such as one by the French biologist, Gilles-Éric Séralini. In 2012 he tried to implicate genetically-modified maize in the formation of tumours in rats. Among many other flaws in this study, such as small sample sizes, it was found that Seralini in fact used a species of rat that has an 80 per cent chance of developing tumours during its lifetime. Although the journal this study was published in has since retracted the paper, it has been used in the US states of Vermont and California as evidence to support the need for GM labelling on foods – a clear example of the media using (bad) science as evidence for a particular agenda, regardless of context or veracity.

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No reliable evidence has been found to suggest that eating GM crops poses risks to human health – but some GM crops could have the potential to dramatically improve it. A good example of this is golden rice, which has been genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A. This could help to combat vitamin A deficiency in the developing world, which currently affects a quarter of a billion people and leads to half a million cases of childhood blindness a year. Reporting on this subject, however, compared to the coverage of EU directives restricting GMOs, has historically been limited to say the least.

This is not to say that GMOs are risk-free – but the risks are more likely to be ecological rather than directly relating to human health. For example, the production of a toxin against a certain pest affecting other organisms, or the spread of a resistance gene from a crop to other plant species. A more concrete issue with GMOs is less related to science and more related to economics. GM crops are expensive to develop and so research is therefore mainly carried out by a small number of large multinationals: in 2015, a quarter of the world’s seed market was controlled by one company. Concerns have been raised about the implications of such a large amount of power over our global food supply being in the hands of a small number of big companies.

Overall, the majority of arguments regarding GMOs seem more related to whether they are ‘unnatural’ or whether scientists are ‘playing God’. The reason for this is a media narrative surrounding GMOs, one aided by organisations like Greenpeace and naturally conservative or anti-science politicians. Narratives like this have become far too common.

What really matters though, is that as with any new technology, genetic modification of crops has both huge potential to improve quality of life and huge potential for exploitation – be it scientifically or economically. However, our global population is set to double in the next 100 years and our changing climate is likely to reduce reliability of crop yields. Without any evidence that this technology produces crops that are a risk to human health, can we really afford not to use it?