Are GMOs the key to solving hunger, or do they pose potential risks to the environment and human health?

GMOs have been on our plates for 18 years, with 37 approved in South Korea alone. While GMO advocates claim to solve hunger and protect the environment, there are concerns about the need for long-term safety verification. Hunger is a matter of distribution, and the safety and environmental impact of GMOs must be carefully examined.

 

GMOs have been on our tables for about 18 years. As of 2023, there are 37 genetically modified agricultural products approved by the Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA), the agency that tests GMOs for safety. In 2023, 4 million tons of edible corn were imported, of which 700,000 tons were GM corn, and a total of 1 million tons of edible soybeans were imported, of which 800,000 tons were confirmed to be GM soybeans. As you can see, GMOs are already widely used in South Korea, most of which are used as feed for livestock or as ingredients in processed foods. Even if consumers don’t realize they are consuming GMOs, they are still getting them into their bodies by eating processed foods on the market or livestock fed GMOs.
The use of GMOs is supported by the argument that GMOs are necessary to produce enough food to feed a large number of people on the planet, and that the process of growing GMOs requires fewer herbicides than conventional agricultural products, thus reducing environmental pollution. It is also argued that the use of GMOs is not problematic because there has been no direct link between human consumption of GMOs and the incidence of disease over the past decade or more. However, just because a GMO has not caused a specific disease in humans or animals does not mean that it is safe, but because it interacts with the environment, it may cause problems decades later, and it should be tested from a wider range of perspectives before it is used. It has also been pointed out that even though GMOs have been used for more than 15 years, the problem of hunger has not been solved, and they may cause more damage to the environment than conventional agricultural products. Therefore, GMOs should be produced under much more stringent conditions than they are now, and even those that are currently approved should be tested and reviewed further, focusing on their health risks and environmental impacts.
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are agricultural products that have been grown to have useful properties by inserting genes for properties that the original genes do not possess and could never occur in nature. Every living thing on Earth has genes, which contain the unique characteristics of each organism and reproduce by passing on their genes to their offspring. Since genes are the basic unit of trait expression and inheritance, inserting another gene into an original gene to express a trait creates an organism with a new trait that its parents did not have. Currently, the most commonly inserted traits are herbicide resistance and insect resistance. The purpose is to create a product that can survive strong herbicides, so that less herbicide is needed to achieve the desired effect, or to make the product itself harmful to insects, so that the insects will die on their own and the product will be more productive. The genes that are inserted can come from biologically unrelated species, even humans, but there are no approved agricultural products that utilize human genes.
The main reason why the production and consumption of GMOs should be treated with caution is that their safety for humans and the environment has not been fully verified and requires a comprehensive and long-term review. In Korea, the agency responsible for verifying the safety of GMOs is the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, which is based on the principle of ‘substantial equivalence’. Substantial equivalence is a method that compares the differences in nutrients, toxins, new proteins, etc. between conventional agricultural products and GMOs, and evaluates the toxicity, allergenicity, and nutritional properties of the different substances to determine that they are substantially equivalent when there are no problems. The KFDA conducts a 270-day review based on this principle, but the problem is that the review period is so short that it can only examine the primary effects of GMOs on human health or the environment, and it is difficult to know what the long-term effects are. In other words, if GMOs are viewed as food, the above method may be appropriate, but if GMOs are viewed as agricultural products that interact with the surrounding ecosystem, the method based on substantial equivalence is insufficient. In 2012, Professor Seralini of Caen University in France conducted an experiment in which rats were fed NK603, a genetically modified corn that is certified and actually consumed in many countries around the world, and found that rats fed NK603 had a much higher incidence of tumors and premature death than the control group. It’s worth noting that the results were different when the experiment was conducted over a two-year period, which is much longer than the agency’s safety testing period. While it’s difficult to conclude that NK603, a GMO, is harmful to humans based on this study alone, as there are many other variables besides the consumption of genetically modified corn, it does suggest that a long enough study might yield different results than we know. Also, since GMOs are closely related to what we eat and live with, we have not yet seen any direct harm from GMOs, so it is not fair to claim that GMOs are safe and should be fully proven to be safe before they are used.
With more than 7 billion people living on the planet today, and the number of people expected to increase to more than 10 billion by 2050, it is difficult to produce enough food for all these people using conventional agriculture, and it is argued that GMOs are the solution. In fact, about 840 million people suffer from hunger and more than 3 million children die of hunger every year. However, according to the United Nations World Food Programme, there is currently enough food on the planet for people around the world to live healthy lives. The biggest causes of hunger are conflict, natural disasters, poor infrastructure, and overdevelopment, and it’s not that there’s not enough food, it’s that it’s not distributed properly. GMOs have been actively used for the past decade, but the number of people suffering from hunger has only increased slightly, indicating that hunger is not a problem of food production. On the other hand, GMOs are often used as feed for livestock or as ingredients in processed foods, which are intended for people in industrialized countries who are far from hungry, rather than for people suffering from hunger, so the argument that GMOs are inevitable because they help fight hunger is not reasonable.
The traits most often inserted into GMOs are herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Herbicide tolerance is the insertion of a trait that is resistant to a specific herbicide, so that a small amount of herbicide applied will only kill the surrounding weeds and leave the produce unharmed, while pest resistance is the insertion of a trait that directly harms the pest, helping to kill the pest. Both methods are more environmentally friendly because they require less herbicide, so it is argued that GMOs are more environmentally friendly than conventional produce. In the short term, GMOs may be more environmentally friendly and economical because they require less herbicide than conventional produce, but after years of cultivating GMOs, super weeds or super pests that are resistant to herbicides may develop, requiring much more pesticides than before, which in turn destroys the environment. In addition, because it is impossible to completely isolate GMOs from the surrounding conventional produce during the cultivation process, genetically engineered and conventional produce can become genetically intermixed, which disrupts the ecosystem. This is called ecological leakage of GMOs, and even if it is not intentionally mixed, it can still interact with conventional agricultural products, and there is a case of GM seed leakage in Canada, where GM canola was cultivated without the public knowing about it. If GMOs were to accidentally mix with the organic produce we eat, the inability to distinguish between GMOs and organic produce would be a serious problem and could lead to irreversible damage long after the fact.
What’s worse is that GMO foods that have not been thoroughly tested for safety are mostly on the market in the form of processed foods, and it’s not easy for consumers to recognize them. According to Article 18 of the Food Hygiene Law, GMOs are required to be labeled as genetically modified foods on products in order to provide accurate information to consumers, but it is not easy for all consumers to read the small print of more than 10 points. On the other hand, even if GMOs and conventional agricultural products are unintentionally mixed during the importation process, they do not need to be labeled as containing GMOs if they contain no more than 3% of GMOs, and even if GMOs are used as ingredients in the production of processed foods, they do not need to be labeled if they are not among the top five ingredients used. This means that many consumers do not check for GMOs when they buy, and even foods that are not labeled may contain GMOs. In addition to this, if GMOs are used in livestock feed, they can also be ingested secondarily through livestock, which can be difficult to detect. Even if you don’t eat GMOs directly, the fact that they can enter your body through processed foods or through livestock raised on GMOs is a big threat to consumers. Therefore, stricter regulations are needed to protect consumers who don’t want GMOs.
Many GMOs, including GM corn and GM soybeans, are currently being cultivated and actively consumed in many countries around the world. South Korea is no exception, and imports of genetically engineered agricultural products are already high and growing every year. GMO advocates say that GMOs are inevitable for reasons such as solving hunger and protecting the environment. In the short term, they seem to solve many of humanity’s problems by making farming more productive, but the reality is that GMOs have not done much to end hunger and are destroying ecosystems. In addition, many consumers are exposed to GMOs without realizing they are consuming them. As Professor Seralini’s experiment at the University of Caen (France) shows, long-term, comprehensive experiments can lead to the conclusion that GMOs are dangerous, and we need to be very careful when verifying the safety of GMOs. Therefore, when discussing the use of GMOs, careful, long-term studies from different angles are needed, and they should be used only after studies have been conducted on how they affect not only the human body but also the ecosystem as a whole. We also need stronger regulations to ensure that consumers are aware of GMO foods that have been tested and verified from multiple perspectives.