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April 14, 2003
Not Guilty By Reason Of Mental Defect
We always knew that Friends of the Earth (FoE) was hysterical about genetically enhanced food crops, but until recently we had no reason to believe that biotech caused the activist group to suffer from schizophrenia as well. The United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency set up a "jury" of demographically diverse citizens to hear the arguments for and against genetically enhanced crops being sold in Britain. The Jury voted 9-6 in favor of technological progress, and FoE leaders are furious.
We always knew that Friends of the Earth (FoE) was hysterical about genetically enhanced food crops, but until recently we had no reason to believe that biotech caused the activist group to suffer from schizophrenia as well. The United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency set up a "jury" of demographically diverse citizens to hear the arguments for and against genetically enhanced crops being sold in Britain. The Jury voted 9-6 in favor of technological progress, and FoE leaders are furious.
Or are they?
One article quotes FoE slamming the jury set up by the British Government as "biased propaganda." But then the group apparently noticed that the jury had also voted in favor of adding special product labels to biotech foods (the kind of warning labels that FoE and other fear-motivated green groups have advocated for years). Suddenly, FoE declared in a press release that the jury acted "quite rightly" on the labeling issue. We're still waiting to hear whether that was "biased propaganda" as well.
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