Media attacks on GMO critics ‘simplistic, misleading representation’

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Hot on the heels of a much publicised article in the New Yorker that set out to attack Vandana Shiva comes another on the Scroll.in website (on September 3). Girish Shahane mounts an attack on Shiva and what he believes to be her false and misleading statements about farmer suicides in India.

According to Shahane, Shiva adopts a non-scientific, ideologically-driven, anti-GMO stance, which is symptomatic of the environmentalist movement. Apparently, this approach rests on a conspiracy theory in which “the bad capitalist corporation dominates everything, corrupts everything.”

The message from Shahane is that anti-GMO campaigners are irrational, are ignoring scientific consensus on GMOs and are letting their conspiracy theories and ideology stand in the way of progress; if the likes of Shiva and others of her ilk do not ditch their irrational fears and Mbeki-type anti-capitalist lunacy, we are in danger of turning our backs on the potential wonders of GMOs given to us by Monsanto.

Europeans and their governments have genuine concerns based on science, not phobias about GMOs fuelled by Shiva. It is not science per se that anti-GMO campaigners reject, as Shahane would like us all to believe, but the use and distortion of science for commercial gain. If anything, it is the pro-GMO lobby that appears to have scant regard for science.

Shahane’s view constitutes a simplistic and misleading representation of those who are concerned about GMOs. He constructs his own straw man position of what he perceives anti-GMO campaigners to be so he can then proceed to knock it down. In doing so he displays his own irrationalism, ideology and lack of informed insight into the issues.

Read the full, original article: Media attacks directed against the critics of biotechnology and genetically modified agriculture

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