“Genetic engineering companies want to create a situation where you have to get permission from a corporation to eat.“
Jerry Brown, Governor of the State of California
The Dangers of GMOs
Experts say that 85% of corn and up to 90% of soybeans are genetically engineered. At least 70% of processed foods on supermarket shelves in America have genetically modified ingredients.
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are being introduced in our food supply without our knowledge or our consent.
Many other countries have banned or restricted the import, distribution, sale and commercial planting of GMO seeds, including China, Japan and the EU because of the lack of testing done on humans.
The testing on animals has brought horrifying results: animals refuse to eat GMO feed, and upon being force-fed, developed lesions, abnormalities and deadly diseases. The poor animals couldn’t fight back.
In the United States, manufacturers are not even required to identify or declare on the label that genetically modified ingredients are being used in food or body products.
These products NEED to be labeled for our basic safety!
The Origin of the GMO Labeling Debate
The beginnings of GMO labeling battle began in Europe. The EU’s regulatory policy on the genetic engineering of food evolved from a basic premise known as the “Precautionary Principle.”
The Precautionary Principle states:
“if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action.”
The Precautionary Principle was the guiding philosophy of many U.S. regulations between the late 1960s and mid 1980s. It was even written into the founding directives of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Why the U.S. abandoned the Precautionary Principle is a very complicated story, starring Ronald Reagan as the deregulator, but more important to the GMO issue is this question: why did the EU change course and adopt the precautionary principle as its regulatory philosophy in the 1990s?
The answer is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or Mad Cow Disease.