A group calling itself the “GE Free Markets Coalition” (which attacks both freedom and markets) released a hit list of “supermarket campaign targets” for 2002. The coalition, which includes Greenpeace, the Institute for Social Ecology, NorthWest RAGE, the Organic Consumers Association, and other top anti-consumer groups, will “take action” against Safeway and Shaw’s stores throughout the United States beginning March 12, and “demand that these stores remove” all genetically improved products from their shelves.
In recent months, Greenpeace, RAGE, and other anti-biotech groups have descended on stores, harassed customers, and vandalized products with stickers linking the foods to toxic waste. And activists with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi-connected anti-biotech front group Mothers for Natural Law have joined an effort to require labels on all biotech foods sold in Oregon.
Luckily, some people have a more responsible view of biotech. The European Union has called genetically improved foods “even safer” than others, and the head of the World Health Organization says biotech can save lives. Now, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, who saved hundreds of thousands of lives by spearheading the biotech Green Revolution, says “biotechnology is going to help us… There’s little or no starvation in Pakistan and India today, and if you travel through China you won’t see emaciated people… we are producing more food on less land than we were in 1940 — all of this due to technology.”
