Organic foods and GM foods are not usually thought of as having any relationship to each other. However, in an op-ed published in the Daily Caller, Patrick Moore, a former head of Greenpeace (who resigned twenty years ago out of disaffection with their fringe activism) and well-known pro-GMO advocate and founder of the pro-Golden Rice campaign Allow Golden Rice Now and Mischa Popoff, a policy analyst at the Heartland Institute, argue that the organic movement and the GMO movement cannot be separated. They in fact exist in perfect anti-technological symbiosis. What s bad for GMOs is good for organics and vice versa.
The basis of their argument is this: But for all the half-baked arguments against Golden Rice along with demands for the useless labeling of foods that have contained GMO ingredients for close to 20 years now, the fact is that organic and Greenpeace activists actually need GMOs. They re quite content to continue to co-exist right alongside their avowed arch nemesis because it provides a vital element to their continued existence as activists.
For this reason, organic activists have stopped demanding bans on GMO foods and instead are pushing for labeling campaigns. The authors assert that ban GMO campaigns have been abandoned, since the anti-technology activists have discerned that GMOs should continue to exist solely for the purpose of scaring consumers into buying organic food. And the labeling efforts will discourage corporations from developing new GMO crops, thus ensuring that GMO foods are never fully accepted by the masses.
And so, while organic, anti-GMO activists continue to push their agenda, many of the world s poorest, hungriest denizens will become collateral damage to promote the anti-science worldview of Greenpeace and their ilk. Popoff and Moore analogize this crusade to the Cold War saying, Organic activists need GMOs the same way the Soviets needed decadent America during the Cold War. Without something plausible, never mind credible, to stand opposed to, they would collapse under the unverifiable weight of their own propaganda. Of course, as with the Cold War, innocent civilians will be sacrificed on the road to Utopia. In this case, it s a couple million people a year in the Third World dying from Vitamin-A deficiency, along with up to 500,000 kids going blind.
Read the full op-ed here!