Table of Contents:
- What Price Does The World Pay For Shunning Technology?
- Then there's the salmon
The anti-everything crowd is also using the Precautionary Principle – the fact that nothing on this earth is 100% assured – to stir up fear inside and outside of governments.
Other than potential entrees, there seems little linking golden rice, genetically modified salmon, and beef from a steer implanted with growth hormones. In fact, all are casualties of something called the Precautionary Principle.
There is no commonly accepted definition. However, presenters at the annual meeting of the National Institute for Animal Agriculture (NIAA) explained it is being used more frequently by regulators everywhere to mean proving something 100% safe for the environment, livestock and people — period.
As such, the anti-everything crowd is also using the principle — the fact that nothing on this earth is 100% assured — to stir up fears inside and outside of governments.
The European Union (EU) began banning hormone-treated beef in 1989, “based entirely on the Precautionary Principle,” Mark Walton explains. He is chief marketing officer for Recombinetics, an innovator in genome editing.
You may be less familiar with golden rice, developed by Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer in the 1990s. Vitamin A deficiency causes blindness and death in children, and affects millions of kids every year in developing countries. Since rice is the primary staple of many folks living in those developing countries, Potrykus and Beyer figured out how to genetically modify rice to produce betacarotene (pro vitamin A). The developers never intended to profit from this. They donated the technology to resource-poor countries where Vitamin A deficiency is a problem. Today, golden rice is only evaluated at research institutes in a couple of countries.
Greenpeace and like-minded organizations continue to engage in a fear-mongering campaign that makes governments and consumers skittish about golden rice, though reams of data prove it is safe.
Keep in mind that approved genetically modified crops first introduced 50 years ago have never yielded a safety problem.