Benefits of GM food

Benefits to consumers

Nutritional Level

People from the developing countries are often malnutrition. They mostly rely only on their staple food such as rice, but rice does not provide them with enough nutrients they need. GM food on the other hand is able to provide them with more nutrients than the normal food. One example would be the ‘golden’ rice that contain high amount of beta carotene. This will help the large number of people suffering from Vitamin A deficiency. Furthermore, the ‘golden rice’ is made to increase the uptake of iron from the soil and when taken will increase the absorption rate of iron in our body solving the iron deficiency problems in developing countries.

The ‘golden’ rice has greater yields compared to the normal rice hence beneficial to the nutritional levels of the people in developing countries, solving problems like food shortages that lead to starvation and malnutrition.

Environmental tolerance

1.1 Cold tolerance
1.2 Drought tolerance

Cold tolerance

GM crop consists of seedlings that are tolerance the very low temperature, hence prevents them from being destroyed in unexpected cold weather. It is done by introducing the genes of fishes that can withstand cold temperature into food like tobacco,

Drought tolerance

Creating GM crops that can withstand drought can help developing countries with dry weather conditions. It can solve the problem of starvation and malnutrition and the problem of land constrain.

Pharmaceutical

Vaccines are always too costly for people in the third world countries, and often require certain storage condition that is not available. Hence researchers are creating GM foods that have the ability to act as vaccines. This will solve the problem of the cost and the storage conditions of the vaccines; example of such food is tomato.

Phtoremediation

Toxins like heavy metal are often present in the soil. Trees are genetically modified to clean up the heavy metal.