Hillary Clinton aide Jack Bobo tells EU: stop 'bashing' GM
In the week environment secretary Owen Paterson made waves with pro-GM comments, a senior US official has further fuelled the debate by urging Europe to come clean with consumers over GM.
Senior advisor on biotech to Hillary Clinton, Jack Bobo, expressed astonishment at the level of public criticism around GM in the EU when - behind the scenes - GM material was widely used in food production.
“You shouldn’t be bashing something you rely on,” he said. “The European livestock industry runs on genetically engineered feed, and GM organisms are widely used in cheese, wine and beer. Let’s make sure we provide all the information, which includes saying: ‘look you’ve been eating beer, wine and cheese for all this time and you’re doing fine.’”
Bobo’s comments echo Defra secretary of state Owen Paterson’s dismissal of health fears surrounding GM, earlier this week, as “nonsense”, adding there was not a single piece of meat served in a typical London restaurant that had not come from animals fed on GM feed.
Readers' comments (3)
Anson Allen | 17 Dec 2012 13:09
Typical whitewash. The point is not that we have not all got cancer yet. The points are that GMO's and their chemicals are bad for farmers, animals, humans, soil nutrition and crop contamination. But most importantly of all is the way the the regualtory systems are manipulated to get these products accepted so that the suppliers can make yet more $billions. Just watch the film "The World According to Monsanto/"
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Robert Jeffery | 20 Dec 2012 10:05
It is not the fear of GM products in the food I eat that worries me, it is the fear of GM crop genes crossing into the weeds and local, indigenous vegetation, creating an uncontrollable and unbalanced natural environment, where cretures great and small either cannot survive or multiply to plague like proportions. Everything in nature, on which we rely for our food supply is a finely balanced inter-relationship of one plant and creature with several others. Upset that balance and world food supplies could very quickly dwindle to famine proportions in a situation which is irreversible.
Robert Jeffery
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Fred Leon | 24 Dec 2012 1:25
This is precisely the point made by Mr. Bobo, people are being feed lie after lie.
@AA, GMOs actually require less or no-chemicals at all. It is the conventional crops the ones that require lots of pesticides that are harmful to the farmers that have to apply them, produce soil and water pollution and contaminated crops.
@RJ, Although it is wonderful to think that human food production is the product of a “finely balanced inter-relationship”, this is not the case. On your next vacation visit the huge corn fields of the mid-west and or the cotton fields in the south or one of the milk farms on the central valley of California and see if your romantic view of human food production conforms to reality. GMOs are not the problem but they can be part of the solution
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