On Oct. 29, investigative reporter Danny Hakim published a front page report in The New York Times that heightened criticism over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the bias of the famous newspaper itself.
GMOs have always been an issue of heated debate in the United States, a western country that has developed its GMO technology under much fewer restrictions and lack of approval than European nations and other developing countries.
The fear of many consumers has always been that the vertical cross breeding of organisms to produce more fit vegetable, grain and fruit products would be dangerous in the unforeseen future to digest. Many experts refute those claims and also mark the recent Times article as one of many pieces misinterpreting the purpose and results of GMOs.
Kavin Senapathy of Forbes made an effort to debunk the Times report by turning to the reactions of various professors throughout the country on the subject. The general consensus was that the purpose of GMOs was not to produce larger yields like the Times piece claimed the crops would over the past 20 years.
In the Forbes piece, chairman of the Horticultural Sciences Department at University of Florida Kevin Folta said, “GE crops were not made to directly increase yields. They control other aspects of growth so that yields are maximized.”
There still lies an inconsistency between the pieces where Hakim points out that France and other European nations have experienced an increased yield per acre without GMOs while professors in the Forbes article suggest the Times piece used data that was not standardized to unit area.
The Times article also boasts its own professorial minds including David Bellinger, a professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health, who attributes the massive drop in I.Q. points in children to the pesticides used on GMOs. Hakim investigated the trend that some of the companies producing GMOs are also involved in the sales of the herbicides and pesticides used to protect the ‘super foods.’
Hakim also noted that, according to his research, pesticide use in U.S. farms has decreased by a third in the past 20 years but that herbicide use has increased by 21 percent in the same time period.
Scholars like Henry Miller of Stanford University still refute the claims of the Times however, citing the majority of their writers as biased against GMOs with Amy Harmon and Andrew Revkin as the exceptions according to the Forbes article.
The controversy of GMOs is likely to continue in developed areas of the world, and it seems the recent media battle of their validity in modern society and levels of success will be areas of study for those interested in finding out every side of this complicated topic.
