Health and Quality of Organic and Transgenic Products

There are now millions of hectares of transgenic cultivation worldwide while the scientific community is still questioning the long-term effects of transgenic foods on human health and the environment. Organic advocates believe that genetic manipulation will alter the characteristics of the food product, some of which are useful and some undesirable. They believe that food products that have not been approved for a long period of time, should not be used. On the other hand, they say that transgenic crops can become dominant in the environment and even endanger some of the natural plants as genetic germplasm sources in the flora of the world. Transgenic crops have made up a large part of the world's agricultural industry. Currently, the level of transgenic crop cultivation has increased more than 100folds since 1996 and reached 189.8-million hectares in 2017. Different countries have made different decisions about production and use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In some countries, their production is permitted while their consumption is unauthorized. In some other countries the production of these products is unauthorized and there are countries where the use of evaluated transgenic products is not prohibited but it should be clearly indicated on the food label that it is transgenic in order to make a conscious consumer choice. The Iran Food and Drug Administration recently announced that these products need to be labeled as transgenic. Currently, the area under cultivation of organic crops is estimated to be about 40-million hectares in the world and about 84-thousand hectares in Iran.