A former U.K. environment secretary is planning to accuse Greenpeace of being complicit in thousands of children’s deaths in opposing genetically modified food on the basis of “mythmaking and misinformation,” The Telegraph reports.
Owen Paterson is planning to deliver the attack in a speech in Pretoria, South Africa on Tuesday, even as 6,000 Third World children die per day due to lack of vitamin A (the same found in carrots and lettuce).
“They call themselves humanitarians and environmentalists,” he is prepared to say, according to The Telegraph. “But their policies would condemn billions to hunger, poverty and underdevelopment. And their insistence on mandating primitive, inefficient farming techniques would decimate the earth’s remaining wild spaces, devastate species and biodiversity, and leave our natural ecology poorer as a result.”
Paterson denounces Greenpeace’s staunch opposition to “golden rice,” a GMO plant enriched with vitamin A. Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has also spoken in support of golden rice, going as far as calling his former organization’s opposition to the crop a “crime against humanity” that may condemn thousands to blindness from lack of vitamin A.
Golden rice and other genetically modified crops could feed the world, Paterson believes. “Progress in the plant sciences is opening up the promise of a second Green Revolution, one that can not only feed the 9 to 10 billion people that will inhabit our planet in 2050, but feed them well.”