Words matter. These are the best Jeremy Rifkin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The industry’s not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled ‘genetically engineered’, the public will shy away and won’t take them.
Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.
The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you’re a farmer and you’re growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.
What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.
A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won’t stop insects from moving across boundaries. That’s absurd.
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.
The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.
If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can spray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won’t kill your corn because it’s producing a gene that makes it tolerant of the herbicide.
Many of the mainstream agricultural scientists, especially at the agricultural schools, but at all of our major universities, are tied into all sorts of contractual relationships and consulting relationships with the life science companies.
What I’m 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 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.
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.
Here we are 17 years later. Those agencies never did come through.
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.
Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this.
The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.
Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn’t make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.
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?
You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect.
Many of the genetically modified foods will be safe, I’m sure. Will most of them be safe? Nobody knows.
One thing I’ve learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There’s no fait accompli to any of this.
The 10 largest antitrust law firms in the United States have gone into the federal courts charging Monsanto with creating a global conspiracy in violation of the antitrust laws, to control the global market in seeds.
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.
We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.
In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn’t have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.
