Genetic engineering is important to the scientific community because A) Genetic engineering provides crops that are less expensive to grow. One of the biggest problems that the world may face in the near future is a food supply shortage due to the increasing exponential growth of the population. Genetic engineering provides crops that are more hearty, larger and less expensive to grow that may be the answer to mounting future problems. The ability to manipulate plants in the lab makes altering their growth pattern a much faster change than many years of natural selection in the farm and field.