Food Politics, Half-Baked. (NY Times)

A call-to-arms to…put down your arms.

One need look no further than the battle over genetically modified crops starting in the 1990s to understand how this language undermines the qualified benefits of biotech innovation. Without a hint of doubt, pro-biotech forces insisted that genetically modified crops would end hunger and eliminate the need for pesticides. Genetic modification was supposedly a harmless panacea that would save the planet. Industry not only promoted this fiction, but it scoffed at the prospects of product labeling, insisting that it was the product, not the process, that mattered.

This arrogant attitude spurred the anti-biotech forces to promote their own distortions. “Frankenfoods” became the term of choice for genetically modified crops. Chemical companies engaged in “biopiracy”; they were killers of monarch butterflies, engineers of future “superweeds,” and according to Jeremy Rifkin, the prominent biotech opponent, monopolizers of an insidious technology that posed “as serious a threat to the existence of life on the planet as the bomb itself.”