# Myths and Realities about Genetically Modified Food: A Risk-Benefit Analysis
## 5 The Future of GM Products  
Agriculture is a relevant sector for the world's economy, and it stretches far beyond food production. One of the most significant social, economic, and scientific challenges of the modern world is its consistently growing human population. It has been estimated that the global population will reach 9 billion people by 2050. As current food production levels will not suffice to meet food demands, achieving global food security poses a serious chal  
Figure 7: Development of edible vaccines. Icons made by Freepik and Smashicons from www.flatico n.com (accessed on 1 December 2021). Adapted from [124]. lenge. The easiest way to overcome this is to increase the acreage of farmable land, but the vast majority of arable agricultural land is unavailable because it is already used. Climate change is another limiting factor that reduces agricultural productivity with its extreme temperatures, high salinities, floods, and acid conditions. Throughout history, humans have made significant food production improvements. The introduction of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides has boosted crop yields. In the 1940s, the \"Green Revolution\" brought about a further substantial increase in crop yields. Nowadays, agrobiotechnology has been proposed as a measure to supply the world's growing future population and to serve as a solution to the \"not enough food\" problem. GE and creating GM crops are promising tools for agriculture as they can help to address some of the challenges that lie ahead. There are further benefits from GM crops, such as bigger crop yields without having to extend cultivated areas and reduced fertilizer use and greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating GM crops from cultivation would sharply increase the global cultivation area at the expense of rainforests, which would intensify greenhouse gas emissions that would, in turn, aggravate climate change [125]. Apart from all these advantages, certain economic benefits are implied. Higher yields, improved productivity, and cost reductions from GM crops have resulted in global economic advantages of USD 15.4 billion in 2015 and USD 167.8 billion from 1996 to 2015 [126]. The public accepting GM crops is one of the main obstacles to commercial application. The development of metabolomics to provide a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative overview of the metabolites present in food could slowly gain public favor [87]. However, consumers may still be skeptical about GM food despite accumulating scientific data. Studies have attempted to analyze changes in attitudes toward GM food by focusing on providing more information about GE and its risks and benefits. After acquiring information on the risks and benefits of GM products, recent public surveys appear to show more acceptance. In most cases, the rejection is based on moral intuitions and scientific arguments suggesting transgenic foods are often not effective. As this strategy proved ineffective, an entirely different one was attempted. Recent studies have worked on addressing the moral GE problem by means of another emotional concern. Respondents were informed about serious global problems using the example of diets lacking vitamin A and how Golden Rice could prevent child deaths and blindness. As the respondents faced these two moral problems, their acceptance of GE grew. Therefore, perhaps the interventions made with the population have not been strong enough to counteract their strongly moralized attitudes toward GMOs [34]. Nowadays, a wide range of GM vegetables is available on the market, mostly soybean, maize, cotton, and canola, as well as other GM species such as rice, squash, papaya, sugar beet, potato, and tomato. However, the creation of new transgenic crops is being investigated, such as apple, mango, pineapple, banana, sweet potato, barley, coconut, and lettuce. As most marketed GM crops now offer tolerance to herbicides or protect from plagues, many benefits are being studied.