Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

I know quite a few farmers all over the United States who have tried this and have said the opposite, that they have to use more herbicides, not less. The same holds true with BT.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can spray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn because it's producing a gene that makes it tolerant of the herbicide.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

Many of the genetically modified foods will be safe, I'm sure. Will most of them be safe? Nobody knows.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

So my attorneys brought litigation in the U.S. federal courts. The judge ruled in our favor.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

The 10 largest antitrust law firms in the United States have gone into the federal courts charging Monsanto with creating a global conspiracy in violation of the antitrust laws, to control the global market in seeds.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

The American public is not aware that there might be potential allergenic and toxic reactions. With regular food, at least people know which foods they have an allergy to.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled "genetically engineered," the public will shy away and won't take them.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
- Jeremy Rifkin Quote