As a college senior, I’ve started to realize that there are essentially three struggles in my everyday life — food, sleep and school.

And while food appears to be arguably the most important of these three struggles, little thought goes into how our food is produced and what it constitutes.

Recently, when I was walking past the Morrow Plots, the United States’ first experimental cornfield, I became curious about what goes into the production of corn. I learned that, in the United States, genetically modified organisms have played a crucial role in the production of corn since the 1990s, helping to grow resistant crops and improve yields.

GMOs are plants or animals with altered genetic codes created to possess traits that they do not naturally have. A particular trait can be copied from one organism and transferred to the genetic code of another organism. For example, if a corn crop was susceptible to disease, a GMO could be used to implant traits to make the crop resistant. The advantages of GMOs are quite apparent when you consider this, in addition to the fact that they have contributed to a significant boom in the agricultural industry since their introduction.

GMOs are a widely contested and debated topic in the agricultural industry. Despite their benefits, GMOs are believed to be unhealthy and have adverse effects on the soil and environment.

As a result, GMOs are used only in crops for agricultural products like ethanol, corn oil and animal feed, while food crops such as wheat and rice don’t use GMOs.

However, some speculate that GMOs might eventually become vital in feeding the world’s population.

For this reason, I believe opposition to GMOs is futile and the question of whether or not we must pervasively employ GMO technology across all our crops might soon become irrelevant. In the future, as the demand for food increases, GMO use will become absolutely necessary and might be the only solution to meet our needs.

The world population is expected to reach the 9 billion point by 2050. In that period, with an ever larger number of people and an increased consumption by the wealthier classes, food demand is expected to go up by 70 to 100 percent. Despite rapid agricultural development over the past 50 years, our production, as it stands now, will be insufficient to meet these demands.

The use of GMOs would be absolutely vital in meeting food demands because GMO technology allows for the creation of crop species that are resistance to diseases, thus, helping to maximize yield.

Another reason GMOs will be invaluable to our future food supply is because they have the potential to make crops resistant to extreme changes in weather, thus, protecting production.

In light of the presented facts, there should be little doubt that GMOs are set to be a necessary reality of the coming future.

In that case, while the current widespread opposition to GMOs is warranted and justified in its concerns, we should consider a revision of negative attitudes.

While GMOs are often regarded as unhealthy, they also seem to be our only option to meet the exponential food demands of the future. Instead of opposing them, we should try to focus on making them better. If these GMOs are going to be in the cereal we eat everyday 50 years from now, I hope we can make them safer.

The resources spent on anti-GMO campaigns could and should be diverted toward research that could make them safer for both our consumption and the environment.

It is important, then, for us to stop thinking about GMOs in our food as something undesirable, but rather something that is vital and in need of improvement.

Being on a campus that is internationally renowned for its agricultural and genomic institutes, we have the resources to battle the issues associated with GMOs at their very core.

But first, something even more basic must occur. Before we can make important scientific breakthroughs in GMO technology, we must work to change the larger attitude with which they are viewed.

Shivam is a senior in Engineering. He can be reached at [email protected].