Youre here: Home » Famous Quotes » Jeremy Rifkin Quotes


FAMOUS QUOTES MENU

» Famous Quotes Home

» Quote Topics

» Author Nationalities

» Author Types

» Popular Searches


 Browse authors:

Jeremy Rifkin Quotes


Page 1 of 2
Jeremy Rifkin
1945 -
Nationality: American
Category: Economist
Subcategory: American Economist

Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this.

   

So my attorneys brought litigation in the U.S. federal courts. The judge ruled in our favor.

   

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

   

Many of the genetically modified foods will be safe, I'm sure. Will most of them be safe? Nobody knows.

   

One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.

   

The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.

   

A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won't stop insects from moving across boundaries. That's absurd.

   

We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.

   

The insurance companies aren't covering that. Should Monsanto be liable for these losses? Should the state government? Who's going to cover the losses? The fact is, here's an industry with no long-term liability in place.

   

The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled "genetically engineered," the public will shy away and won't take them.

   

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.

   

I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.

   

The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.

   

The American public is not aware that there might be potential allergenic and toxic reactions. With regular food, at least people know which foods they have an allergy to.

   

Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.

   

What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting.

   

You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect.

   

The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.

   

In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.

   

Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.

   

Page:   1 | 2

Privacy Policy
Copyright © 1999-2008 eDigg.com. All rights reserved.