Biotechnology Promoting Hunger
Advances in biotechnology, rather than feeding the world, are making matters worse by fueling the production of inefficient products like animal feed and food-competing biofuels.
The world population is set to rise to nine billion by 2050, but our current method of food production is insufficient to meet everyone’s caloric needs. “We haven’t really used genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to ‘feed the world,'” says Samuel Fromartz. “Instead we’ve used them bring down the cost of industrial meat production and incentivize a transition to a meat-centric diet. The loss of calories that result from feeding grains to animals instead of humans represents the annual calorie needs of more than 3.5 billion people, according to the UN Environmental Program. In short, GMOs arguably are making matters worse by fueling the production of more animal feed and food-competing biofuels.”
