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Saturday, August 10, 2013

Greenpeace's unethical playing with the lives of people by supporting sabotage of Golden Rice as part of NGO fund-raising.


Greenpeace propaganda PR spin in the Philippines, after GM rice trial vandalism, reveals their irresponsible lack of care for the consequences of their own scaremongering;
"Beau Baconguis, programme manager for Greenpeace Southeast Asia based in the Philippines is concerned, however. "There is not enough safety testing done on any GM crops," she says.
Baconguis believes the farmers took matters into their own hands because they were concerned about their crops being contaminated. "I think that the farmers know what they want. What they want is a safe environment that they can grow their crops in," she says.
But Bruce Tolentino, deputy director general at IRRI, says there was almost no risk of contamination. "These are confined field trials," he says. "They're fenced. They're covered by nets. They're protected from rats and birds. And, we hoped, people."
He also pointed to research showing that rice is generally self-pollinated and so is unlikely to contaminate other crops. And because the beta-carotene that Golden Rice contains doesn't give it a competitive advantage over wild rice, it is unlikely to endanger biodiversity.
Tolentino says the destroyed field was part of a study aiming to figure out whether Golden Rice will behave just like ordinary rice, thereby not requiring farmers to change their practices. "We were hoping we would get data from this field but we also have five other locations to get the data from. So it is not a major blow to the research process," he says. "But it is a major blow to public acceptance of what's going on."
Although Golden Rice is not being developed for profit, activists argue that it is being used as a propaganda tool to soften the image of GM crops. Golden Rice is the "poster boy" of the industry, says Baconguis. "This is playing with the lives of people when you are using Golden Rice to promote more GMOs in our food."...
@ Militant Filipino farmers destroy Golden Rice GM crop - environment - 09 August 2013 - New Scientist:

Note for the record, Greenpeace have --  by their own admission -- been actively sabotaging this humanitarian research right from the beginning.

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