Plan B Forum

More than 100 Nobel laureates are calling on Greenpeace to end its anti-GMO campaign

Updated by Brad Plumer on June 30, 2016, 5:40 p.m. ET @bradplumer brad@vox.com
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Rice field in the Philippines. No Golden Rice here (yet). (Shutterstock)

This week, 109 Nobel laureates signed onto a sharply worded letter to Greenpeace urging the environmental group to rethink its longstanding opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The writers argue that the anti-GMO campaign is scientifically baseless and potentially harmful to poor people in the developing world.

Joel Achenbach broke the news in the Washington Post, and you can read the full letter here. The signatories include past winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics.
Nobel laureates to Greenpeace: Your anti-GMO campaign has to end

The letter notes that scientific assessments have repeatedly found GM foods are just as safe to eat as conventional foods and don’t pose an inherent risk to the environment (though, like any technology, they can be misused). Greenpeace, it argues, is on the wrong side here:

We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against "GMOs" in general and Golden Rice in particular.

Scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production. There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. Their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment, and a boon to global biodiversity.

The laureates also take Greenpeace to task for seeking to block Golden Rice, a strain of not-yet-approved rice that has been genetically enhanced to produce beta carotene — which, its creators hope, might one day alleviate the Vitamin A deficiency that’s causing widespread death and blindness in the developing world:

Greenpeace has spearheaded opposition to Golden Rice, which has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by a vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia. ...

WE CALL UPON GREENPEACE to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general;

Now, Greenpeace is far from the only reason Golden Rice has struggled to get regulatory approval — the crop also faces very serious technical challenges. Greenpeace isn’t even the only group seeking to block it. But they’re certainly a high-profile face of GMO opposition, so the laureates are focusing on them.

In a posted response, Greenpeace denied that they were the main reason Golden Rice has failed to come to market, but still showed no sign of ending their broader anti-GMO campaign. We'll get to that, but I do want to elaborate on a few issues the letter raises.
Greenpeace accepts climate science. So why do they dismiss GMO science?


Let’s start off by noting that GMOs will never be a purely scientific issue. Like every policy matter on the planet, the question of how best to incorporate biotechnology into agriculture involves value judgments about what an ideal food system might look like, how to weigh the risks against the benefits, and so on.

But those positions can at least be informed by scientific understanding. To take a different example, on climate change, Greenpeace tends to take very seriously what scientists are telling them. Their website refers frequently to the scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer and humans are the cause.

By contrast, Greenpeace’s public statements on GMOs tend to be startlingly unscientific. On their website, they refer to transgenic crops as "genetic pollution." This is absurd. When scientists create transgenic crops, they frequently use Agrobacterium to transfer genes from one plant or organism to another. But nature does this too: Scientists recently discovered that on two separate occasions in history, Agrobacterium transferred bacterial DNA into the sweet potatoes we now eat. Are sweet potatoes also "polluted"? Because it's the same thing. ... "

"... In a reply to the Nobel laureates' letter, Greenpeace insisted as much: "Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered ‘Golden’ rice are false," said Wilhelmina Pelegrina, Campaigner at Greenpeace Southeast Asia "‘Golden’ rice has failed as a solution and isn’t currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research."

True. But rather irrelevant. It is also fundamentally hard to create a Zika vaccine. It would nonetheless be misguided for me to wage a campaign against researchers working on the project or file a petition to stop trials without any good evidence that it was a risk — even if my protests weren’t the main hold-up.

On a final note, I do think Greenpeace does enormously vital work around the world. They played a crucial role in pressuring soy and beef companies in Brazil to reduce deforestation of the Amazon. Their efforts in China to pare back unnecessary coal-burning plants are one of the most consequential climate campaigns going.

But on GMOs, they are very much in the wrong. Let's hope this letter prods them to reflect and reconsider.