At the period of lackluster and drab Mount Tambora volcanic winter of 1816, one of the world’s greatest fiction stories was penned by Mary Shelly. This will turn out to become her literary masterpiece; Frankenstein. By a long shot, few other sci-fi novels have had the tendency to invent such an eerie influence in articulating people’s instinctual fears of scientific innovation. So much that the depreciatory prefix ‘Franken’- has become a well-used figure in world diction harshly describing different occurrences where technology outdoes us by threatening our inherent comfort with natural things, one of which is the field of Genetically Modified Organisms known severely as Frankenfoods.
This widespread opposition to Frankenfoods is quite harsh though as the anti-GMO campaign being vigorously launched around the world does not reflect actual scientific reality. Many nationals of developing countries especially have held the conviction that Frankenfoods are an ungodly construction much like how the townsfolk rallied against Frankenstein’s unnatural creation in Mary Shelly’s classic. Instead of hastily and narrowly branding GMOs as the devils incendiary bomb to wipe out human reasoning in dieting, we should instead consider accessing the GMOs from a more real and scientific perspective.
GMOs such as alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, pawpaw, squash, and sugar beets are grown on commercial scale on arable farms in the US. Millions of farmers are making double to triple what they used to make before GMOs were adopted and adapted to. The GMOs according the US National Academies of Science, repeated researches and investigations conducted have shed light on the harmless effects of consuming Frakenfoods. The scare has simply been engineered by superstition.
GMOS additionally provide immense agricultural benefits such as resistance of plants to pest and tolerance to many environmental stresses—herbicides, insects, drought, salinity, and lack of soil nutrients. Besides there used to be a repeatedly increasing rate of the use of pesticides and herbicides, potentially poor yields, cross-contamination, and reduced genetic diversity before GMOs were introduced to take those worries away. If the world can agree that man makes metal buses to fly across countries and oceans with and finds that natural, then perhaps GMOs shouldn’t be scorned as much as it is.
…Gabriel Opare Jnr.