For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page and our Millions Against Monsanto page.

Earlier this month, Mark Lynas, a prominent UK environmentalist and author, delivered a blunt attack (text here; video below the fold) on critics of agricultural biotechnology at a farming conference at Oxford University. Reviewing the development of his opinions on GMOs, Lynas reports that back in the ’90s, he had an instant emotional reaction against them. He saw the situation like this: “Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us.” And so he “helped to start the anti-GM movement,” and “spent several years ripping up GM crops.” Then, in the process of researching climate change, he “discovered science”; and soon after, he reports, he “discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths,” which he goes on to list.

Lynas is quite correct that the backlash against GMOs is often clouded by emotion. He points out that even today, certain GMO critics murmur darkly about Monsanto’s “terminator” seeds, designed to produce sterile offspring so farmers can’t replant saved seeds. Actually, Monsanto itself swore off ever using the terminator trait back in 1999, declaring it shared “many of the concerns of small landholder farmers” who opposed it. The GMO seed industry protects its traits through patents and contracts, not genetics.

But he veers off course by portraying such fringe critics of GMOs as the driving force of an “anti-science movement” to block the novel technology. He dismisses the idea that reasonable people might disagree about the merits of GMOs. “[M]y conclusion here today is very clear,” he declares. “The GM debate is over. It is finished.”