Over the weekend just past, most significant for honoring our armed forces on Memorial Day, another far less notable event was marked: global demonstrations against Monsanto and GM-food.
Why? For no other reason than that hordes of demonstrators have been whipped into a frenzy by anti-genetic-engineering zealots who artfully and cynically exploit people s baseless fears of frankenfood. Simultaneously, they get to target the biotech agribusiness giant, Monsanto, as the Big Brother against which they can generate Two Minutes of Hate (see Orwell s dystopian 1984), thus killing two of their favorite targets with one stone.
The facts are these: GMO-containing food products have been planted and harvested in increasingly vast areas, first here in the U.S., then worldwide, over the past 17 years. The benefits of biotech-agriculture are many: increased crop yields, reduced chemical pesticide inputs, resistance to natural climate variations including drought and salinity of the soil, and still held up by superstition golden rice to reduce the dreadful toll of vitamin A deficiency in the third world. All of these attributes will help to allay malnutrition, which (while not a threat in the developed world where the activists dwell) is a huge problem in the impoverished regions of the earth.
The technology will help if it is allowed to be further developed and expanded, and not curbed by the agenda-driven opponents. Those who are trying to strangle GM agriculture are proponents of organic farming, although as is often the case they claim to be acting out of concern for public health. Utter nonsense, and the scientists at agricultural research arms of agribusiness will hopefully continue their work without serious interference from the street demonstrations similar to last weekend s. It is too bad that the general public is not sufficiently informed about sound science to protect them from demagogues and activists who can all-too-easily manipulate them by using fear and sound bites to create controversy where none should exist. They tried that last year with a phony right to know campaign Prop 37 which was meant to force GMO foods to be labeled as such. That issue was trounced, and hopefully so will the similar measures be in other states.
Stay tuned for the imminent appearance of ACSH s landmark classic, Agricultural Biotechnology, publication date next month! The myths surrounding GM food products will be quashed definitively in this monograph.