Fred Kirschenmann is an organic farmer who chooses not to plant genetically engineered seed. He shares his concerns about the use of genetic engineering in food production.
We've obviously been manipulating plant and animal organisms for a long time. The difference here is that we're now dealing with a new generation of technologies. It's not just genetic engineering, it's also robotics and nanotechnology. Each of these new generation of technologies are self-replicating. That is the basic difference. So that we're really setting in motion a dynamic there that we will not have control over because these are self-replicating. You can't pull them back; you can't stop them at some point and say o.k. that didn't work out and we don't want to do that anymore. So there are no exits here. That's the thing that's basically different. So in one sense...it's doing what we've always done. We manipulate things and try to get things to grow the way we want them to grow. But it's using a much more powerful technology now, so it is different.
Transcript for Clip 2 -- Labeling
It seems to me that labeling is a fundamental right that consumers should have. I mean, we...live in a democracy and people should have access to information. The only way that you can have adequate access to information in terms of how your food was produced is if you have some kind of label that says "here's what happened." Even if there are only ten consumers that demand [labeling], it seems to me those consumers have a right to be heard. If someone does get ill and the food is not labeled, there's no way to track it. If someone comes down with an allergy and the food hasn't been labeled and there's no way to know whether or not the food they ate was a genetically engineered variety or not, how do you track that? So then you really can't protect future consumers from [potential food-related problems]. I think labeling is essential.
Transcript for Clip 3 -- Feed the World
Even if we are wildly successful with producing tons of additional corn and soybeans or other commodities as a result of genetic engineering, it's not going to feed the world. I mean, we are producing more corn and soybeans right now than the world can possibly consume and we've got 840 million people who are malnourished on this planet. Hunger is caused by a very complex set of factors. It has to do with everything from local ecologies and local social systems, and fundamentally it boils down to the fact that people aren't entitled to food. It isn't that there isn't enough food available but they're not entitled to it for all of these complex social and ecological factors. Just producing more [food] isn't going to change that. So the reason that I say [it is immoral to the issue of world hunger as a reason to use genetic engineering] is that we are leading the public to believe that all we need to solve the hunger crisis with an expanding population is just produce more stuff, and that's not true.
