GMO’s turn climate change and don’t solve.

Industrial-scale GMOs perpetuate climate change, say critics

Many scientists and environmental campaigners don't agree that GM crops can promise food security or help fight the climate change-induced extreme droughts and floods that are decimating agriculture.

New GMOs will continue to perpetuate an "agro-industrial system" that "bears substantial responsibility for the climate crisis," Anneleen Kenis, lecturer in political ecology and environmental justice at Brunel University, London, told DW.

Currently, food systems generate around one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions fuelling climate change. And in the US, more than half of harvested cropland is produced with genetically modified seeds.

Kenis' research argues that GMOs often involve "large-scale monocultures" of limited crop varieties that also require great amounts of artificial fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation.

"It's a very energy-intensive system in terms of the input it needs to function. There is nothing sustainable about further strengthening this system," said the researcher, adding that GMOs are promoted by the same "agro-industrial giants" that also control and profit from "a large part of the seed, food, pesticide and fertilizer market."

So far, this system has also failed "to feed large parts of the population in different parts of the world," Kenis claims. At least 250 million people in nearly 60 countries endure crisis-level food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).