People are talking

Why all GE foods
should be labeled

People are talking

We're looking forward to the campaign against Measure 27 because we can't see an ethical basis for not supporting such common-sense legislation. We only wish the federal Food and Drug Administration had done its job and made this an industry requirement before consumers had to take the initiative.
Corvallis Gazette-Times, Sept. 23, endorsing Measure 27

Spending on ballot measure campaigns is a reliable barometer of sentiment among any affected interests that have the ability to raise lots of money. A costly campaign against a measure is a sure sign that they see it as a threat, and that they take the threat seriously. [Bill] Lunch [an OSU political scientists] is probably not the only Oregonian surprised to find a seemingly modest food labeling measure judged as a far bigger threat than a proposal to scrap the entire health care finance system and replace it with a single-payer plan.
Eugene Register-Guard editorial, Oct. 2

If your technology is so great, then why won't you give me a choice in the supermarket?
Donna Harris, chief petitioner for the labeling initiative

If they spend $6 million, that would set a new high.
John Lindback, of the Secretary of State's office, on the opposition's record-setting spending on a ballot initiative

Besides, who can possibly predict long-term effects? Byron P Rigby, president of the Australian Association of Ayurvedic Medicine, recently wrote in the Australian newspaper, Living Now, that biotechnology makes Chernobyl, "mad-cow" disease, and cane toads pale in comparison, given its "completely imponderable effects". Now the question remains, how much are countries willing to gamble for a softer bread crust or a firmer tomato?
The Lancet, V.352, N.9125, August 1, 1998

Faced with a ballot initiative that calls on food companies to label products that contain genetically
modified ingredients, the Coalition Against the Costly Labeling Law is trying to sell Oregonians on the idea that such labeling would cost millions in 'government bureaucracy and red tape.' The campaign's premise is a lie, of course. The industry isn't concerned about red tape - or if it is, it's a secondary issue. What truly worries the industry - the reason it has resisted labeling since GM foods were introduced a decade ago - is that consumers will select unmodified foods if given a choice. So the campaign is about denying them that choice, but calling the group the Coalition Against Informed Consumers probably sounded like a bad idea.
Paul Holmes, president of The Holmes Group, in an article for PR Week, Oct. 7, 2002

....there is clearly a segment of the public that wants to know how its food is made, and it is hard to see any moral basis on which companies would deny that right. Apparently, the increased corporate transparency we've heard about doesn't encompass this kind of information. Instead, the industry is essentially saying, 'Trust us, you don't need to know.'
Paul Holmes, president of The Holmes Group, in an article for PR Week, Oct. 7, 2002

...21st century PR isn't about controlling the flow of information or deciding what information the public has a right to. It's about putting information in context. If the GM food industry doesn't believe its PR people are smart enough to explain its products' benefits, it should either hire new PR people or get a new product. Fighting against an informed public only creates the impression that it has a sinister secret to hide.
Paul Holmes, president of The Holmes Group, in an article for PR Week, Oct. 7, 2002

It seems a stretch to believe that labeling would add very much to food costs -- which would be passed along to consumers. It's also hard to imagine that a label would significantly harm the sales of food containing bioengineered ingredients.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch weighs in on hometown Monsanto's anti-Measure 27 efforts

I have a feeling that science has transgressed a barrier that should have remained inviolate. . . . You cannot recall a new form of life. . . . It will survive you and your children and your children's children. An irreversible attack on the biosphere is something so unheard of, so unthinkable in previous generations, that I only wish that mine had not been guilty of it.
Erwin Chargaff, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry, Columbia University, and discoverer of "Chargaff's Rules," the scientific foundation for the discovery of the DNA double helix

I have held in my hand the germ of a plant engineered to grow, yield its crop, and then murder its own embryos, and there I glimpsed the malevolence that can lie in the heart of a profiteering enterprise. There once was a time when Thoreau wrote, "I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." By the power vested in everything living, let us keep to that faith. I'm a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer's whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship: a temple, a mosque, or a cathedral. A sacred grove, as ancient as time.
Barbara Kingsolver, from "A Fist in the Eye of God" in Small Wonder

In the past scientific efforts have been concentrated to learn 'about' Nature, so that we can exploit Nature and control her for human benefit. Now is the time to learn 'from' Nature and adore Nature so that human existence can be made sustainable.
Donella Meadows, writer

Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
Rachel Carson, author, Silent Spring

High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Supersquash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us?
Annita Manning

As a biologist, I look at GMOs as bad science—no peer review. You can't expect the shareholders of large multinational companies to be socially responsible and objective enough to review their own science.
Nell Newman, Newman's Own Organics

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was lent to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.
Native American proverb

In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.
Robert G. Ingersoll

The people are dying. Even the houses are dying.
80-year-old African-American resident of Anniston, Alabama, while observng the bulldozing of houses in his neighborhood as a result of PCB contamination caused by a Monsanto factory

Monsanto behaves not as a company offering life and hope but as a bully trying to force its products on us. It sues those that oppose it, suppressing, not encouraging, debate. And when it does debate, as in its recent UK press ads, Monsanto gets it wrong.
Peter Melchett, Greenpeace, in a BBC column

People know what kind of world they want for themselves and their children. They know how they want companies to behave and they know how they want their food to be produced and Monsanto, I believe, are blocking that progress.
Peter Melchett, Greenpeace, in a BBC column

It is very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs.
Dr Arpad Pusztai, formerly of the Rowett Research Institute speaking on Granada TV's World in Action (1998), quoted in BBC News report, February 12, 1999

As near as I can tell, one trouble with Monsanto is that it is full of brilliant geneticists with no sense of ecology. So serious concerns about the effects of transgenic crops in nature -- the inevitable development of resistance, the possible spread of traits that should not spread -- are waved away.
Donella Meadows, environmental columnist, The Global Citizen, March 18, 1999

This is basically what's happening. They are patenting their seeds. Monsanto produces 80 percent of the genetically engineered seeds in the world today. This is a stunning market share, unheard of really. Even with all the market consolidation you see in the world economy, 80 percent dominance by one company is just staggering. They are uniquely selfish with no regard for the well-being of others. I don't know that all corporations have to behave the way Monsanto does.
John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, Reclaiming Our Health, May All Be Fed and The Food Revolution, in an interview with Common Ground

This is an imperfect technology with inherent dangers. ..... It is the unpredictability of the outcomes that is most worrying.
Dr. Michael Antoniou, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology, London

(A genetically modified plant is) like an ecosystem. You can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another.
Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, quoted by Michael Pollan in his article "Playing God in the Garden", New York Times Sunday Magazine, October 25, 1998

My feeling is that the industry didn't believe its own propaganda. Internally, biotech executives were saying that the advantages of this new technology were so huge that they made the risks acceptable. If they really believed their own assessment, they would have presented this technology to the people and allowed the people to decide. They would have explained all the potential benefits, and all the risks, and I believe people would have accepted the risks. But the industry didn't believe it, and so they risked everything on a strategy of secrecy.
Peter Sandman, founder of the Environmental Risk Communications Program at Rutgers University, quoted in an article in the journal Reputation Management, Sowing the seeds of destruction, by Paul Holmes

They [consumers] view access to information as a fundamental human right. And they will take action against companies that do not provide them the information to which they believe they are entitled.
Paul Holmes, PR Week, quoted in a speech to Crop Protection Institute Conference by Hans J. Loose

Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups.
Paul Krugman, Economist

To use genetic engineering to manipulate plants, release them into the environment and introduce them into our food chain is scientifically premature, unsafe and irresponsible.
Dr Ricarda Steinbrecher, geneticist

Genetic engineering is often justified as a humane technology, one that feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is to increase the sales of chemicals and bio-engineered products to dependent farmers.
David Ehrenfield, Professor of Biology, Rutgers University, USA, from 'A Cruel Agriculture' in Resurgence, March/April 1998

Patents on life are so immoral, and so unjust, and so against nature and people, that it really only needs awareness in larger numbers for the whole thing to come to a stop.
Dr Vandana Shiva, New Internationalist interview

If it is left to me, I would certainly not eat it. We are putting new
things into food which have not been eaten before. The effects on the
immune system are not easily predictable and I challenge anyone who will
say that the effects are predictable.
Professor Arpad Pusztai, of the Food, Gut, and Microbial Interactions Group, Rowett Research Institute, on the health risks associated with genetically engineered food.

I see worries in the fact that we have the power to manipulate genes in
ways that would be improbable or impossible through conventional evolution.
We shouldn't be complacent in thinking that we can predict the results.
Colin Blakemore, Waynflete professor of physiology at Oxford University and
President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science

The fact is, it is virtually impossible to even conceive of a testing
procedure to assess the health effects of genetically engineered foods when
introduced into the food chain, nor is there any valid nutritional or
public interest reason for their introduction.
Professor Richard Lacey, microbiologist, medical doctor, and Professor of Food Safety at Leeds University, world famous for his accurate prediction of the dangers of " Mad cow disease".

Over the last fifteen years, I and other scientists have put the FDA on
notice about the potential dangers of genetically engineered foods. Instead
of responsible regulation we have seen bureaucratic bungling and
obfuscation that have left public health and the environment at risk.
Dr. Philip Regal, Professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the
University of Minnesota

The FDA has placed the interest of a handful of biotechnology companies
ahead of their responsibility to protect public health. By failing to
require testing and labeling of genetically engineered foods, the agency
has made consumers unknowing guinea pigs for potentially harmful,
unregulated food substances.
Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the International Center for
Technology Assessment (CTA)

Millions of ordinary people are very worried about genetically modified
foods and I am one of them....With genetically modified foods I believe we
have reached the thin edge of the wedge, we are messing with the building
blocks of life and it's scary.
Malcom Walker, Chairman and Chief Executive of Iceland Foods, 26th December 1996

Monsanto claims in its letter to me that there is no difference between
ordinary soya beans and what it calls round-up soya beans, and therefore
that they should not be segregated. I maintain that members of the public
who notice what is going on simply do not believe that, and will
increasingly demand to know what is in the food they eat - roundup or
otherwise... the Government and the EU should resist the power of the giant
food companies in the United States, which are effectively dictating what
we must eat, without giving any convincing estimates of the long-term
effects.
Colin Pickthall, Member of Parliament for West Lancashire, speaking in the
House of Commons, 13th December 1996

Gene technology is driven by bad science. It may well ruin our food
supply, destroy biodiversity and unleash pandemics of antibiotic resistant
infectious diseases.
Dr Mae-Wan Ho, head of the Bio-Electrodynamics laboratory at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK

What you are seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it is really a consolidation of the entire food chain. Since water is as central to food production as seed is, and without water life is not possible, Monsanto is now trying to establish its control over water.
Robert Farley, Monsanto

The perception that everything is totally straightforward and safe is utterly naive. I don't think we fully understand the dimensions of what we're getting into.
Professor Philip James (author of the "James" report on the structure and functions of the proposed UK Food Standards Agency to oversee national food safety standards)
Director of the Rowett Research Institute, Aberdeen, on genetically engineered food

This is a Pandora's box and a lot of people wonder whether it's worth opening it."
George Gaskell, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics

The biotech industry has chosen a slam dunk strategy to gain public acceptance for its products: Slip unlabeled genetically engineered food into the food supply and hope too many people don't notice or object. Deal with those who do notice and object with an army of "experts" that stand ready to refute any criticisms or critics of the technology. If a lot of people start to object, by that time it should be too late because much of the food supply will already be genetically engineered.
Karen Charman, PR Watch, in an article: Force Feeding Genetically Engineered Foods

In 1989 a genetically engineered brand of L-tryptophan, a common dietary supplement, killed 37 Americans and permanently disabled or afflicted more than 5,000 others with [the] blood disorder, eosinophilia myalgia syndrome (EMS), before it was recalled by the Food and Drug Administration. The manufacturer, Showa Denko, Japan's third largest chemical company, had for the first time in 1988-89 used GE bacteria to produce the over-the-counter supplement. It is believed that the bacteria somehow became contaminated during the recombinant DNA process. Showa Denko has already paid out over $2 billion in damages to EMS victims.
Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

Under FDA law, unless a food is "generally regarded as safe" (GRAS), a legal determination, it must be thoroughly tested. Because biotech foods have been determined "GRAS," they undergo no independent safety testing. Instead, government regulators rely on biotech companies to do their own safety tests and also determine themselves if the product in question is GRAS.
Karen Charman, PR Watch, Winter 1999

GE foods were never meant to eliminate hunger. The advertisements were about hunger. But, GE has been and will be always, a technology to generate profits for the handful of corporations that call themselves "life-sciences" corporations, which is an insult to life. I would rather call them "death-sciences" corporations.
Vandana Shiva, Director, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. Excerpted from "Stolen Harvest" Interview, CorpWatch, March 2000

Whenever possible corporations will require farmers to buy the company's brand of inputs and will forbid farmers from keeping or selling seed. By controlling germplasm from seed to sale, and by forcing farmers to pay inflated prices for seed-chemical packages, companies are determined to extract the most profit from their investment.
Peter Rosset, Executive Director, Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First and Miguel A. Altieri, Professor, University of California, Berkeley

This technology is being promoted, in the face of concerns by respectable scientists and in the face of data to the contrary, by the very agencies which are supposed to be protecting human health and the environment. The bottom line in my view is that we are confronted with the most powerful technology the world has ever known, and it is being rapidly deployed with almost no thought whatsoever to its consequences.
Dr Suzanne Wuerthele, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) toxicologist

Within 10 years we will have a moderate to large-scale ecological or economic catastrophe, because there will be so many products being released.
Professor Norman Ellstrand, ecological geneticist at the University of California

If you look at the simple principle of 'genetic modification' it spells 'ecological disaster.' There are no ways of quantifying the risks ... The solution is simply to ban the use of genetic modification in food.
Dr Harash Narang, microbiologist and senior research associate at the University of Leeds, who originally pointed to the possible link between mad cow disease (BSE) and CJD in humans

The fundamental problem of the way in which GM foods have been approved is that they haven't really been tested properly at all. All that has happened is something which I would characterise as an exercise in wishful thinking.
Dr. Erik Millstone, Sussex University. See Dr Millstone's article on this

There is an awful lot unknown about hazards of new [GM food] crops and until it is fully tested we should not be subjecting people to risks, least of all young children.
Dr Ian Gibson MP, former Dean of Biology at the University of East Anglia, has called for a ban on GM foods until longer term safety testing has taken place. He has also expressed concern about the inclusion of GM ingredients in school meals

By transferring genes across species barriers which have existed for aeons between species like humans and sheep we risk breaching natural thresholds against unexpected biological processes. For example, an incorrectly folded form of an ordinary cellular protein can under certain circumstances be replicative and give rise to infectious neurological disease.
Dr. Peter Wills, theoretical biologist at Auckland University

The generation of genetically engineered plants and animals involves the random integration of artificial combinations of genetic material from unrelated species into the DNA of the host organism. This procedure results in disruption of the genetic blueprint of the organism with totally unpredictable consequences. The unexpected production of toxic substances has now been observed in genetically engineered bacteria, yeast, plants, and animals with the problem remaining undetected until a major health hazard has arisen. Moreover, genetically engineered food or enzymatic food processing agents may produce an immediate effect or it could take years for full toxicity to come to light.
Dr Michael Antoniou, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Pathology at Guy’s Hospital

Once released into the environment, unlike a BSE epidemic or chemical spill, genetic mistakes cannot be contained, recalled or cleaned up, but will be passed onto all future generations indefinitely.
Dr Michael Antoniou, Clinical Geneticist and Senior Lecturer in Molecular Pathology, London

The biological world cannot be owned or controlled by corporations, or any other interests, as it is a collective resource that has evolved and been generated over centuries.
Tewolde Egziabher, Ethiopian delegate to the Conference of Parties IV to the Convention on Biological Diversity

What we are witnessing is one of the greatest revolts against a new technology in history. We will see whether this revolt will be judged by history as a triumph of new democracy..or a backward response to inevitable 'progress'.
John Vidal, The Guardian (UK), 23.3.99

Food security of African countries should not depend on risky products.
Dr Paul Senghor, Ministry for Agriculture, Senegal, Africa