ARTICLE: A World Without GMOs

The following is an excerpt of an article by Marc Zienkiewicz at the American Seed website examining what modern agriculture would look like without GMO technology.

Imagining a world without genetically modified organisms isn’t hard to do, but researchers say the prospect is detrimental to both farmers and consumers.

U.S. researchers have a mathematical model at their disposal, which allows them to envision what the country, and the world, might look like if a certain situation were to play out, such as differing levels of biofuel production. That’s exactly how Wally Tyner started using Purdue University’s computable general equilibrium (CGE) models.

Most recently, Tyner, a Purdue agricultural economist, and other researchers asked what the economic and greenhouse gas emission impacts would be if genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were banned in the United States.

Knowing that 18 million farmers in 28 countries planted about 181 million hectares (447 million acres) of GMO crops in 2014, with about 40 percent of that in the United States, they fed that data into a version the CGE model that’s designed to examine the economy-wide impacts and land use consequences of agricultural, energy, trade and environmental policies.

The results paint a surprising picture of what would be in store if GMOs were banned in the United States.

The results: serious yield declines, higher food prices and a major loss of forest and pasture land. Corn yield declines of 11.2 percent on average would be seen across the United States, according to the results, and soybeans would lose 5.2 percent of their yields, and cotton 18.6 percent.

To make up for that loss, about 252,000 acres of forest and pasture land would have to be converted to cropland.

To read the full article, please visit the American Seed website.