3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin 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.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin 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.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin Many of the mainstream agricultural scientists, especially at the agricultural schools, but at all of our major universities, are tied into all sorts of contractual relationships and consulting relationships with the life science companies.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin 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.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin The position I took at the time was that we hadn’t really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin 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.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin They’re now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin What I’m suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin 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.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin 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.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there’s no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin 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.
3 December 2020 Jeremy Rifkin What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.
