Greenpeace launches biotech-food scare

The radical environmental outfit Greenpeace has launched a war against Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" soybeans. Monsanto developed the bean to resist a herbicide contained in its "Roundup" spray, so that it can be applied to both weeds and plants alike without destroying the desired crop.

When the New York Times reported that a small amount of alien genetic material had been found in Monsanto's altered soybeans, Greenpeace pounced – declaring that Monsanto "has created a new life form, but doesn't know what will happen when it's turned loose in the world."

However, Marc De Loose, the chief Belgian researcher who detected the genetic material, rejected Greenpeace's demands that safety approval of the beans be withheld – adding that there are "no scientific data to support this idea" that the soybeans could pose any harm.

The European Commission in Brussels also declared that there was no reason to believe the soybeans were unsafe.

According to Monsanto, the heretofore unknown sequence was 534 DNA "letters" out of a soybean genome of about 1.5 billion letters.

Washington State University toxicologist Allan Felsot points out that the DNA "contains no functional genes and therefore can't affect a plant one way or another."

Observers say that this latest incident demonstrates that Greenpeace's reputation for scare mongering is richly deserved.

Source: Michael Fumento (Hudson Institute), Not Worth a Pile of (Soy)Beans, Washington Times, September 6, 2001.

For text http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20010906-1368293.htm

For more on Biotechnology
http://www.ncpa.org/pi/enviro/envdex13a.html


FMF/11 September 2001