What we keep on and off the table reflects our way of thinking

Food always harks back to its origin. Seeing food along grocery aisles, we engage in a quiet deliberation: Is this organic? How is it grown? Is the production sustainable? Beyond the supermarket, food can be traced back to the hands of the farmers and fishermen, to the earth and the seas that provide it.

According to several studies, food production would have to increase by 60 percent in order to feed a world population of nine billion come 2050. Many agree that in order to cater to this growing appetite, a system should be put in place to ensure food security, not only on the local level but also on a worldwide scale while ensuring affordable and stable prices on the market. This means innovating, maximizing our resources’ efficiency and ensuring sustainable food production practices. We rely even more on science to guide the workings of this system. However, two major players in food production, agro-industries and the organic movement, are in constant quarrel, a result, it appears, of disagreement in philosophy more so than in actual logic.

In December 2015, the Supreme Court’s ( SC) decision to uphold the Court of Appeals’ 2013 ruling on banning the field testing of Bt Talong and the SC’s rule to stop all activities concerned with genetically modified organisms (GMO) threw the agricultural and scientific community in an unnecessary limbo. Greenpeace and other anti-GMO groups were able to halt research and development and importation of GMOs through the Writ of Kalikasan, a legal remedy that allows plaintiffs to stop activities that are deemed harmful to the environment or that would deprive citizens the right “to a balanced and healthful ecology in accord with the rhythm and harmony of nature.” The scientific community rallied against the ruling, some even called the act as anti-science and anti-poor. GMO is a relatively new technology that began with the creation of the first GMO in 1973. However, genetic manipulation is not an entirely new and unnatural process. Humans have been selectively breeding crops for centuries—even organic farmers practice selective breeding to create better crops. With genetic engineering, scientists are able to directly inject specific genes into organisms, even introducing the genes of other species into the mix. In the case of Bt Talong, the eggplant genome has been injected with the genes of soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis, an organism found in bacterial pesticide used in conventional and organic farming, that gives it the bacteria’s inherent ability to produce proteins that kill off pests.

Anti-GMO protesters decry this “unnatural” mixing of species. When the technology was first introduced, a fear of creating “frankenfoods” that could harm the human body was at the forefront of anti-GMO consumption. However, tests conducted by multiple credible scientific institutions have seen little to no harm in consuming GMO products. Despite this, the fear of GMOs’ effects on the body continues. The greatest argument on GMO, however, is its impact on the environment. The argument being GMOs, with their built-in advantages such as pest-resistance, could affect biodiversity by overtaking their non-pest-resistant wild counterpart, affecting genetic diversity within the specie, and even take away space from other species