Eliminating GMOs would raise food prices

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — If genetically modified organisms in the United States were banned, consumers could expect higher food prices.

There would also be a significant boost in greenhouse gas emissions due to land use change and major loss of forest and pasture land, according to a recent Purdue University study.

Ag economists Wally Tyner, Farzad Taheripour and Harry Mahaffey wanted to know the significance of crop yield loss if genetically modified crops were banned from U.S. farm fields, as well as how that decision would trickle down to other parts of the economy. The study was funded by the California Grain & Feed Association.

“This is not an argument to keep or lose GMOs,” Tyner said. “It’s just a simple question: What happens if they go away?”

Lower yields

The economists gathered data and found that 18 million farmers in 28 countries planted about 181 million hectares of GMO crops in 2014, with about 40 percent of that in the United States. They fed that data into a Purdue-developed model, GTAP-BIO, which has been used to examine economic consequences of changes to agricultural, energy, trade and environmental policies.

Eliminating all GMOs in the United States, the model shows corn yield declines of 11.2 percent on average. Soybeans lose 5.2 percent of their yields and cotton 18.6 percent.

Spiral

To make up for that loss, nearly 250,000 acres of forest and pasture would have to be converted to cropland. Greenhouse gas emissions increase significantly because with lower crop yields, more land is needed for agricultural production, and it must be converted from pasture and forest.

“In general, the land use change, the pasture and forest you need to convert to cropland to produce the amount of food that you need is greater than all of the land use change that we have previously estimated for the U.S. ethanol program,” Tyner said.

“Some of the same groups that oppose GMOs want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the potential for global warming,” Tyner said. “The result we get is that you can’t have it both ways. If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture, an important tool to do that is with GMO traits.”

Higher commodity prices

With lower crop yields without GMO traits, commodity prices rise. Corn prices would increase as much as 28 percent and soybeans as much as 22 percent, according to the study.

Consumers could expect food prices to rise 1-2 percent, or $14 billion to $24 billion per year.

In the United States, GMOs make up almost all the corn (89 percent), soybeans (94 percent) and cotton (91 percent) planted each year. Some countries have already banned GMOs, have not adopted them as widely or are considering bans.

Tyner and Taheripour said they will continue their research to understand how expansion of and reductions of GMO crops worldwide could affect economies and the environment.

“If in the future we ban GMOs at the global scale, we lose lots of potential yield,” Taheripour said. “If more countries adopt GMOs, their yields will be much higher.”