Critics say Greenpeace opposes beneficial biotechnology

Millions of lives could be saved and economic development could be helped along if Greenpeace ended its senseless campaigns against the insecticide DDT and biotechnology, says the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Steven J. Milloy.

Although the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT use in the United States in 1972, the ban and its tenuous rationale was never intended to be applied outside the country.

Environmental groups, including Greenpeace, nevertheless exported the ban, making control of malaria-bearing mosquitoes in poor countries essentially impossible.

Every year, the ban helps cause hundreds of millions of cases of malaria and tens of millions of resulting deaths in Africa and other parts of the developing world.

Greenpeace also campaigns against the use of agricultural biotechnology, including "Golden Rice," which could help with the severe Vitamin A deficiency that afflicts hundreds of millions in Africa and Asia and blinds 500,000 children each year.

Scientists developed Golden Rice using the gene that makes daffodils yellow. The gene makes the rice rich in beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A.

But as pointed out by Greenpeace co-founder and former President Patrick Moore, now a vociferous critic of the activist group: "Greenpeace activists threaten to rip the biotech rice out of the fields if farmers dare to plant it. They have done everything they can to discredit the scientists and the technology."

Source: Steven J. Milloy, Rock Stars' Activism Could Be Put to Better Use, Competitive Enterprise Institute, June 24, 2005.

For text:http://www.cei.org/gencon/019,04632.cfm

For more on Agriculture: Pesticides:http://eteam.ncpa.org/policy/Agriculture/Pesticides/

FMF Policy Bulletin/ 5 July 2005