In the controversy of BT Brinjal in India, I would like to share my opinion about GM Crops:
What is GM?
GM techniques are the direct manipulation of the genetic makeup of organisms for human or animal consumption using the latest molecular biology techniques. Combining genes from different organisms is known as recombinant DNA technology and the resulting organism is said to be "Genetically Modified," "Genetically engineered," or "Transgenic."
Importance of GM:
Today‘s world population is 6.8 billions and by 2050 it’s going to be 9.5 billions upward. In 40 years the population will be increased by 40%, our natural resources are shrinking and many regions of the world will be lack of food and nutritional security. The answer for the challenges is to increase the cultivation with more yields and nutritional values. Bio-technology brought revolutionary changes in crop production and management techniques by reduce the dependency on conventional insecticides, herbicides.GM Corps improve the quality of nutritional contents and of food products, bring higher net economic returns to the farmers and reduce the risk of environment pollution.
A number of developed and developing countries including USA, Argentina, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Spain, France, South Africa and China are growing genetically modified crops. The Indian first Transgenic crop BT cotton made rapid strides to Bio technology crops in India. Lot of farmers adopted the BT cotton, cultivated more than 700,000 acres and got a lot of gain in terms yields and cost wise. GM Maize illustrated great results in South Africa, and American Continent. Most of the scientific organizations like UK academies of sciences, US National academy of sciences, GRAS- FDA, International Food Policy research Institute- Asia, WHO and all are concluded thatGM Crops can be used to produce foods. The global transgenic crops market is going to be $25 billion by 2010.
Achieving Food and Nutritional security is not easy task, we need to try every option either GM or Conventional. The food grains which are cultivated today are not absolutely wholly natural, some of them are altered by selective breeding or chemicals or Viruses. Definitely, we need to depend on these modern technologies to get bumper yields, disease resistant and drought resistant crops for growing food need. The government and the progressive thinkers should focus on public understanding on AG-Bio technology.
We are against to hunger and poverty, not to the technology.
