The importance of Living Modified Organisms ( LMO)

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The importance of LMO

Since human population has increased dramatically, the demand for food is increasing also to fulfil the myriad population. Moreover, climate changes caused the natural disasters like flood and drought to happen more often, resulting in uncontrollable disruption to crops and livestocks. Hence, to overcome these problems, scientists come out with a solution, Living Modified Organisms (LMOs) which is also known as Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). One of the intentions of LMOs is to overcome food crisis. Genetically modified (GM) crops are designed to enhance their qualities such as longer storage, higher crops yield, ability to grow larger, and reduced cost in aspect of food production, need for herbicides and insecticides as well as higher nutritional value. Another concern is that LMOs nowadays are associated with pharmaceutical value, for example, vaccination does not need to be done via injection but we can have vaccines get into our bodies by the practice of LMOs consumption in the near future.
The statement of Lusk and Miller (2014) clearly pointed out the importance of LMOs nowadays especially in the aspect of economy, as the land for farming getting less. Consequently, food production will be lesser whereas costs of production will increase significantly. Nowadays in US, 90% of the farm land is used to plant genetic modified wheat and soybean. Indeed, economic gains in US from 1996 to 2008 were more than $50 billion (as shown in Figure 1). With the molecular engineering technology, the prices of food will be more affordable for the poverty. As stated by Chen and Tseng (2011), agricultural food prices had decreased about 2% per year from year 1961 till 1999.

Production through 1996-2008 (Peterso...

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Olster, M. (2013). GMO foods: Key points in the genetically modified debate. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/02/gmo-foods_n_3693246.html

Phillips, T. (2008) Genetically modified organisms (GMOs): Transgenic crops and recombinant DNA technology. Nature Education, 1(1), 213

REUTERS. (2013). As health fears ebb, Africa looks at easing GM crop bans. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/06/eu-africa-gmo-idUSL5N0EG3K520130606

Runge, C. F., Bagnara, G., & Jackson, L. A. (2001). Differing U.S. and European perspectives on GMOs: Political, economic and cultural issues. The Estey Centre Journal of International Law and Trade Policy, 2(2), 221-234

The New York Times. (2003). Genetically modified food and the poor. Retrived from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/opinion/genetically-modified-food-and-the-poor.html

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