You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect.- Jeremy Rifkin
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting.
What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.
What I am suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.
We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.
We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.
We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.
We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.
They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.
The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you are a farmer and you are growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.
The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.
The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.
The insurance companies aren't covering that. Should Monsanto be liable for these losses? Should the state government? Who's going to cover the losses? The fact is, here's an industry with no long-term liability in place.
The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled "genetically engineered," the public will shy away and would not take them.
