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Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
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A head of butter lettuce with a non GMO Project label. Mendel's pea plant experiments A halved pinkglow pineapple with light pink flesh and yellow-green rind sits on a wooden cutting board. Rice plants with dry, light brown rice seeds coming from the top of each plant.
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A head of butter lettuce with a non GMO Project label.
GMO Should GMOs be grown?

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

Should GMOs be grown?
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History

Selective breeding (intentionally choosing and mating organisms with the “best traits” in the hope of reproducing more of those traits in their offspring) has been used for thousands of years for altering the genetic makeup of plants—to make them bigger and better, more beautiful and bountiful. The earliest forms of selective breeding were simple and have persisted to the present: farmers save and plant only the seeds of plants that produced the tastiest, hardiest, or largest (or otherwise preferable) results.

Mendel's pea plant experiments
Mendel's pea plant experimentsInfographic of the pea plant's binary traits that were studied by Gregor Mendel; these traits are sorted by recessive and dominant variances.

From the mid-1850s through the mid-1860s, Austrian monk Gregor Mendel experimented with the crossbreeding of pea plants and refined his research, discovering the principles of inheritance. Although largely unchampioned in his lifetime, his work was foundational to the rise of modern genetics, allowing scientists to move from Mendel’s understanding of heredity (how dominant and recessive traits in plants and animals are transmitted to successive generations through discrete units later called genes) to genetic engineering (identifying specific genes, isolating their DNA—the chemical molecule that carries an organism’s genetic material—and then manipulating them with molecular tools such as recombinant DNA and CRISPR for the creation of desirable traits—such as pest resistance, improved nutrition and taste, or drought tolerance—in genetically modified organisms called GMOs).[1] [2] [53] [55]

A halved pinkglow pineapple with light pink flesh and yellow-green rind sits on a wooden cutting board.
GMO “Pinkglow” pineapple

To create a genetically modified (GM) plant, scientists have followed these basic steps over the years:

  1. Identify the desired trait and find an animal or plant with that trait. For example, scientists were looking to make corn more insect-resistant. They identified a gene in a soil bacterium (Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt), that naturally produces an insecticide (a substance or chemical that kills, repels, or controls insects)commonly used in organic agriculture.
  2. Copy the specific gene for the desired trait.
  3. Insert the specific gene into the DNA of the plant scientists want to change. In the above example, the insecticide gene from Bacillus thuringiensis was inserted into corn.
  4. Grow the new plant and perform tests for safety and the desired trait. [55]
Rice plants with dry, light brown rice seeds coming from the top of each plant.
GMO crops: Golden rice is genetically modified to provide people with more vitamin A than other kinds of rice.

According to the Genetic Literacy Project, “The most recent data from the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) shows that more than 18 million farmers in 29 countries, including 19 developing nations, planted over 190 million hectares (469.5 million acres) of GMO crops in 2019.” The organization stated that a “majority” of European countries and Russia, among other countries, ban the crops. However, most countries that ban the growth of GMO crops allow their import. Europe, for example, imports 30 million tons of corn and soy animal feeds every year, much of which is GMO. [58]

In the United States the health and environmental safety standards for GMO crops are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Between 1985 and Sept. 2013, the USDA approved over 17,000 different GMO crops for field trials, including varieties of corn, soybean, potato, tomato, wheat, canola, and rice, with various genetic modifications such as herbicide tolerance; insect, fungal, and drought resistance; and flavor or nutrition enhancement. [44] [45]

In 1994 the “FLAVR SAVR” tomato became the first genetically modified food to be approved for public consumption by the FDA. The tomato was genetically modified to increase its firmness, for resisting potential damage during shipping, and to extend its shelf life. However, due to high production costs, supply chain problems, public skepticism and concerns about GMOs, and a bland taste in the opinion of some, the product had been discontinued and taken off the market by the end of the decade.[51] [66]

More recently, “bioengineered” has become the preferred term over “GM” (“genetically modified”) for food altered in the lab, because almost all food has been “genetically modified” via conventional, age-old selective breeding techniques or other basic growing methods. In other words, bioengineered food refers specifically to food that has undergone modification using rDNA/lab technology, but it does not include food genetically modified merely by basic cross-breeding or selective breeding techniques. For example, merely cross-breeding corn with a specialty corn would not be considered bioengineered; however, inserting a gene from one species of corn into another species of corn in a lab would be considered bioengineered. [56] [65]

GMO and bioengineered foods crops have become increasingly prevalent. As of 2024, more than 90 percent of American acres planted with soybean, cotton, and corn used GMO seeds. As of February 19, 2025, the USDA listed 14 bioengineered products available in the U.S.: alfalfa, Arctic apples, canola, corn, cotton, BARI Bt Begun varieties of eggplant, ringspot virus-resistant varieties of papaya, pink flesh varieties of pineapple, potato, AquAdvantage salmon, soybean, summer squash, sugarbeet, and Bt insect-resistant sugarcane. [56] [57] [65]

The National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard established mandatory national standards for labeling foods with genetically engineered ingredients in the United States. The standard was implemented on Jan. 1, 2020, and compliance was mandatory as of June 23, 2025. [46]

According to a 2024 poll, while 37 percent of Americans believed GMO foods were worse than foods with no genetic modification, 47 percent believed they were neither better nor worse than non-modified food. Only 16 percent believed GMO foods were better. [61]

Pros and Cons at a Glance

PROSCONS
Pro 1: GMO crops have been proven safe through testing and use and can even increase the safety of common foods. Read More.Con 1: GMO crops have not been proven safe for long-term consumption through human clinical trials. Read More.
Pro 2: Genetic modification improves crop yields, lowers the price of food, and increases nutritional content, helping to alleviate world hunger. Read More.Con 2: Tinkering with the genetic makeup of plants can result in changes to the food supply that introduce toxins or trigger allergic reactions. Read More.
Pro 3: Growing GMO crops has environmental benefits, such as reduced pesticide use, less water waste, and lower carbon emissions. Read More.Con 3: GMO crops can harm the environment through the increased use of toxic herbicides and pesticides. Read More.

Pro Arguments

 (Go to Con Arguments)

Pro 1: GMO crops have been proven safe through testing and use and can even increase the safety of common foods.

As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explained, “Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food. There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There’s no wild cows
.We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It’s called artificial selection.” [54]

“GMOs are more thoroughly tested than any product produced in the history of agriculture,” according to Martina Newell-McGoughlin, director of the University of California Systemwide Biotechnology Research and Education Program. The Food and Drug Administration has concluded “GMOs do not affect you differently than non-GMO foods.” [8] [62]

Over 2,000 studies worldwide have affirmed the safety of GMO crops. Humans have eaten trillions of meals containing GMO ingredients, with zero verified cases of illness related to genetically altered food. [10] [11]

GMO crops can even be engineered to reduce natural allergens and toxins, making them safer and healthier. Molecular biologist Hortense Dodo genetically engineered a hypoallergenic peanut by suppressing the protein that can lead to a deadly reaction in people with peanut allergies. [12]

Pro 2: Genetic modification improves crop yields, lowers the price of food, and increases nutritional content, helping to alleviate world hunger.

According to the most recent World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, 1 in 11 people (about 733 million) faced hunger globally. Population growth, climate change, over-farming, and water shortages all contribute to food scarcity. GMOs can help address those problems with genetic engineering to improve crop yields and help farmers grow food in drought regions or on depleted soil, thereby lowering food prices and feeding more people. [13] [14] [15] [16] [63]

David Zilberman, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California at Berkeley, said that GMO crops have “raised the output of corn, cotton and soy by 20 to 30 percent, allowing some people to survive who would not have without it. If it were more widely adopted around the world, the price [of food] would go lower, and fewer people would die of hunger.” [17]

To combat Vitamin A deficiency, the main cause of childhood blindness in developing countries, researchers developed a GMO “Golden Rice” that produces high levels of beta-carotene. A report by Australia and New Zealand’s food safety regulator found that Golden Rice “is considered to be as safe for human consumption as food derived from conventional rice.” [18] [19] [20]

Pro 3: Growing GMO crops has environmental benefits, such as reduced pesticide use, less water waste, and lower carbon emissions.

The two main types of GMO crops in use are bioengineered to either produce their own pesticides (substances that kill, repel, or control pests like insects, weeds, fungi, rodents, bacteria, and viruses) or to be herbicide-tolerant (resistant to herbicides applied to the crops to kill or protect them from dangerous weeds). More than 80 percent of corn grown in the U.S. is GMO Bt corn, which produces its own Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) insecticide. This has reduced the need for spraying insecticides over corn fields by 35 percent, and dozens of studies have shown there are no environmental or health concerns with Bt corn. [21] [22] [23] [59]

Drought-tolerant varieties of GMO corn have been shown to reduce transpiration (evaporation of water off of plants) by up to 17.5 percent, resulting in less water waste. [24]

Herbicide-tolerant (Ht) GMO soy crops have reduced the need to till the soil to remove weeds. Tilling is a process that involves breaking up the soil, which brings carbon to the surface. When that carbon mixes with oxygen in the atmosphere, it becomes carbon dioxide and contributes to global warming. Reduced tilling preserves topsoil, reduces soil erosion and water runoff (keeping fertilizers out of the water supply), and lowers carbon emissions. The decreased use of fuel and tilling as a result of growing GMO crops can lower greenhouse gas emissions as much as removing 12 million cars from the roads each year. [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30]

The global population is expected to increase by two billion by 2050. Andrew Allan, a plant biologist at the University of Auckland, explained, “So where’s that extra food going to come from? It can’t come from using more land, because if we use more land, then we’ve got to deforest more, and the [global] temperature goes up even more. So what we really need is more productivity. And that, in all likelihood, will require G.M.O.s.” [59]

Con Arguments

 (Go to Pro Arguments)

Con 1: GMO crops have not been proven safe for long-term consumption through human clinical trials.

Scientists still don’t know what the long-term effects of significant GMO consumption could be. “The contention that GMOs pose no risks to human health can’t be supported by studies that have measured a time frame that is too short to determine the effects of exposure over a lifetime, asserted Robert Gould, pathologist at the University of California at San Francisco.[33]

Genetically modified ingredients are in 70–80 percent of food eaten in the United States, even though there haven’t been any long term clinical trials on humans to determine whether GMO foods are safe. [31] [32]

According to the Center for Food Safety, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization, “Each genetic insertion creates the added possibility that formerly nontoxic elements in the food could become toxic.” The group says that resistance to antibiotics, cancer, and suppressed immune function are among potential risks of genetic modification using viral DNA. [34]

As Megan Westgate, executive director of the Non-GMO Project, explained, “Anyone who knows about genetics knows that there’s a lot we don’t understand. We’re always discovering new things or finding out that things we believed aren’t actually right.” Because of the lack of testing, we may not have found the particular dangers in GMO foods yet, but that doesn’t make them safe to consume. [59]

Con 2: Tinkering with the genetic makeup of plants can result in changes to the food supply that introduce toxins or trigger allergic reactions.

“Three major health risks potentially associated with GMO foods are: toxicity, allergenicity and genetic hazards,” according to a study published in Food Science and Human Wellness. The authors raised concerns that the GMO process could disrupt a plant’s genetic integrity, with the potential to activate toxins or change metabolic toxin levels in a ripple effect beyond detection. [35]

A joint commission of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) identified two potential unintended effects of genetic modification of food sources: higher levels of allergens in a host plant that contains known allergenic properties, and new proteins created by the gene insertion that could cause allergic reactions. [36]

The insertion of a gene to modify a plant can cause problems in the resulting food. After StarLink corn was genetically altered to be insect-resistant, there were several reported cases of allergic reactions in consumers. The reactions ranged from abdominal pain and diarrhea to skin rashes to life-threatening issues. [37]

Con 3: GMO crops can harm the environment through the increased use of toxic herbicides and pesticides.

An “epidemic of super-weeds” has developed resistance to the herbicides (chemicals or substances developed specifically to kill or control unwanted plants such as weeds in agriculture, gardens, and other areas) that GMO crops were designed to tolerate since herbicide-resistant GMO crop varieties were developed in 1996. Those weeds choke crops on over 60 million acres of American croplands, and the solution widely presented to farmers is to use more herbicides. This has led to a tenfold increase in the use of the weed killer Roundup, which was created by Monsanto, also the largest GMO seed producer. (Monsanto was acquired by the Bayer company in 2018.) [33] [38]

The increased use of the weed killer glyphosate (created by Monsanto) to kill the weeds that compete with crops can harm pollinating insects. Scientists blame Roundup (the active ingredient of which is glyphosate) for a 90 percent decrease in the monarch butterfly population in the U.S. The weed killer potentially creates health risks for humans who ingest traces of herbicides used on GMO crops. When glyphosate is used near rivers, local wildlife is impacted, including a higher mortality rates among amphibians. [38] [41] [42]

A report from the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network found that “herbicide-tolerant crops reduce weed diversity in and around fields, which in turn reduces habitat and food for other important species.” [43]

As Melissa Waddell of the Non-GMO Project explains, â€œMost GMO crops are engineered for herbicide resistance, so fields can be sprayed liberally with weedkillers that eliminate everything but the cash crop. Weeds are a huge problem for farmers—they compete with cash crops for nutrients, water and light. But diverse plant life also protects the soil from erosion and nutrient loss. It supports the pollinators and other beneficial insects that do so much of our agricultural labor. While ‘welcoming the weeds’ isn’t a practical solution, neither is wiping out plant life with toxic chemicals. Between herbicide tolerance and built-in pesticides [substances or mixtures that kill, repel, or control a wide variety of pests such as insects, fungi, and rodents, as well as weeds], GMOs are a double-decker biodiversity-wrecker.”. [60]

Furthermore, insects can simply adapt to the pesticides in GMOs. A 2024 study found the cotton bollworm (Helicoverpa zea) evolved to resist GMO cotton. The bug’s insecticide resistance is now not associated with any of the 20 genes the cotton had been genetically modified to combat. [64]

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Discussion questions

  1. Should GMOs be grown and used in foods? Why or why not?
  2. Should food labels include whether GMO plants have been included in the products? Why or why not?
  3. What other ways can world hunger be alleviated if not via GMOs? Explain your answers.
  4. What questions do you have after reading the debate above? Where might you find answers?
  5. What was the most interesting thing you learned from this debate?
  6. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? How and why?. If your thoughts have not changed, explain how and why you better understand the other side of the debate.
  7. Push for the position and policies you support by writing local officials, U.S. senators and representatives, or other people in a position to make the change you champion.

Sources

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