WEEK 7 - BIOBUSINESS REVOLUTION - AGRICULTURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

This week's class is on the BioBusiness Revolution - Agriculture and The Environment. Prof started the class with this trends in urbanization chart which shows that more and more people are moving from rural to urban areas which meant that peoples' ways of lives have changed. For example, people no longer grow their own food which means they're more dependent - which probably resulted in a 'revolution' of old agriculture way - this resulted in an impact on the environment. As people move to urban areas, they are becoming increasingly dependent on others for food, standard of living has also changed as urban areas have better infrastructure and more opportunities for employment. With increasing population growth, there is an increasing need to address food security issues. I think urbanization has impacted the way we eat and obviously, the environment has to 'pay' in some sense as people milk the environment for resources in order to urbanize.

One of the key issues that we talked about was on GM food. Our discussion led to if we should label GM foods. Well, I think it has its pros and cons and is highly debatable. I understand why some may think we shouldn't label GM food because labelling means you're just basically saying this food is different from the others however, Prof said labelling could be a good thing as we could somehow track the effects of GM food. A good thing may come out of it, should people who eat GM food become immune to some disease and such. Well, I think... you should label it, Prof's guest from Japan mentioned how people are labelling their food as non-GM as a marketing tactic. I think labelling it allows consumers to choose but I don't think there would be a need to print in it bold Genetically Modified as it sounds awful. Labelling GM foods means that consumers would know what they're getting and it's only their right to know. Personally, I think not labelling has created some sort of negative connotations to GM food, people may start to think you're not labelling because it's 'bad' and you're hiding or something.

The food security issue was also brought up and presented by Lenard from our class. As mentioned by Lenard's chosen article, there are around 1 billion hungry people around the globe. In addition to ensuring that there is sufficient food production, we mustn't neglect the fact that hunger is often related to poverty...

In any case, I really like this lesson (7/10) as I learned more about GM foods and the ethics behind it! I wish there was more discussion on the industrial biobusiness..