Magic rice has been developed for decades and it has got both praise and blame. What is magic rice? Magic rice is the kind of crop produced by crossing two varieties of a particular crop. It is also called the hybrid rice. The idea of magic rice is that if you cross two parents which are genetically distant from each other, the offspring will be magical, particularly in terms of yields. Is magic rice a good thing? Although the magic rice can increase the yields, it is not a good thing to generalize.
Some critics think that the magic rice contributes to the overpopulation. The view is not accuracy but producing more food can in some degree blind people of the severity of overpopulation.
The magic rice can in some degree increase the yields of the crop, but producing more food does not simply result in overpopulation. The real causes for overpopulation are more complex. The growth in population is about the vast improvement of public health which leads to decline in death rate and rise in the birth rate, lack of education, cultural influences, the improvement of food distribution and so on. It is the combining effort of all these factors that lead to the problem of overpopulation. Merely increasing the food supply cannot cause the population to boom. Therefore, we cannot simply conclude that the magic rice contributes to the overpopulation.
But there is a more severe problem. Some people may think that as long as they can produce enough food for living, the overpopulation is not a big problem. This is a big misunderstanding. The magic rice can increase the supply of food, feed more people and help solve the problem of food shortage, but it may blind people of the severity of overpopulation. They will hold the view that no matter how large the population is, there will always be enough food with the help of magic rice. The long-term problems coming along with overpopulation like pollution, resource shortage and all kinds of social