biomolecular peculiarities to create technologies and new products with the aim of improving mankind’s lives and the health state of our planet. It is interesting fact that we have been using the biological processes for more than five thousand years with the goal of creating useful consumable products (bread, butter, cheese, sour cream and millions of others) and with the purpose to preserve the dairy products as well as to increase the lifespan of food products.
This brand new biotechnology that we see today provides us with technologies to cope with rare diseases, and to reduce our negative impact on the environmental situation, provide with sufficient reserves of food products the hungry, alternative energy sources, and to make the industrial manufacturing process much more cleaner and sufficient.
At this moment of time there are more than 200 revolutionary biotechnology medical products that became available to patients, to treat the diseases that used to be untreatable. From another hand it became handy in agriculture: More than 12 million farmers globally use agricultural biotechnological achievements to increase crops, reduce and prevent the damage outside factors such as insects and pests and also make the agricultural activity more environment-friendly. Furthermore, there are more than 50 factories were established in the Northern America to create a new type of fuel: biofuel.
The main idea of the movie Seeds of change is to shed the light on the concern of Genetically modified products and whether they are good or bad, whether they have a negative influence on us? To answer this question the movie is addressed on two debating sides: The ones that claim that Genetically modified organisms (in our case canola) benefit everyone including farmers, consumers. “Biotechnology helps farms of all sizes!”. Another group – influenced by the Green Peace movement, state that such changes in the biology, which are not properly studied yet, might turn to be a disaster. Genetically modified products could harm our health. There are certain pros and cons that are clearly pointer out in the movie.
Benefits:
- Statistics shows that the farmers gain increased by $5.8 from crops per acre
- Much more even growth of the grop(because of the herbicide)
- Low cost
- Easy to handle
- Dockage (the amount of seeds is reduced from %10 to 2-3% of dockage. Reduces the cost of transportation from the fields to infrastructure.
- Yield benefits
- Economically viable
Farmers are choosing Genetic modified canola primarily for weed control benefits.
Risks:
- Contamination
- Seeds – can the modified gene move to non-modified organisms? That is the risk farmers and scientists tak.
- They can mix with non modified organisms even if you did not want to grow a genetically modified crop
- Herbicide-tolerant Volunteer organism
- Gene stacking (the organisms are resistant to herbicides)
- Lack of tests could result in problems with new technologies
- Compensations for lost corps are questioned.
- Technical Risk (terminator technology is used to control contamination)
- Intimidation and fear of using this technology
- Health of soil is getting worse due to the fact that round-up crops with zero tillage.
Finally, there are pros and cons. Each side has arguments that might catch your attention. Speaking of me – I do not like the idea of interrogating into the “mother-nature” sphere of rule. The world should be as it has been meant thousands of years ago. People all over the world start to switch to GMO free food products, so does my family, because such organisms could be harmful for us.
Works Cited
"Seeds of Change." Seeds of Change. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 June 2013. <http://seedsofchangefilm.org/index.php?p=watch_film>.
