From Newsmax

Connecticut and Maine recently passed bills requiring labels identifying all foods made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and similar legislation is pending in at least 20 states.

But labels on GMO foods would have unforeseen consequences and would be a “bad idea,” Scientific American warns.

First of all, the publication points out, farmers have been tinkering with our food to boost production since the dawn of agriculture, and for the past 20 years Americans have been eating plants that have been modified to help crops tolerate drought and resist herbicides. About 70 percent of processed foods in America contain genetically modified ingredients.

“Instead of providing people with useful information, mandatory GMO labels would only intensify the misconception that so-called Frankenfoods endanger people’s health,” Scientific American (SA) asserts, noting that the Food and Drug Administration has tested all the GMOs on the market and found that they are neither toxic nor allergenic.

The European Union provides a telling example. In 1997, the E.U. began requiring labels on GMO foods. By 1999, major European retailers, fearful that consumers would shun these foods, had removed genetically modified ingredients from their products.

But because conventional crops need more water and pesticides than GMOs do, the unmodified products are usually more expensive, so “we would all have to pay a premium on non-GMO foods — and for a questionable return,” SA observes.

A research firm estimated that Proposition 37, a labeling initiative that was narrowly rejected by California voters last year, would have raised the average family’s food bill by up to $400 a year.

Indeed, a seven-year study in India showed that farmers growing a genetically modified crop boosted their yield per acre by 24 percent.

German scientists have engineered so-called Golden Rice to produce beta-carotene, which is converted in the body to the active form of vitamin A. Every year, about half a million children go blind as a result of vitamin A deficiency, and 70 percent of those die within a year of losing their sight.

But Greenpeace and other GMO opponents have managed to delay the introduction of Golden Rice to the Philippines, India, and China.

The Insider Report noted in December that prominent experts claimed opposition to GMOs was coming from anti-science, anti-technology groups.

“Activism intended to delay progress toward life-saving products and technologies is irresponsible and despicable,” according to an article co-written by Henry I. Miller, the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Miller is also the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The debates over GMO labeling “are about so much more than slapping ostensibly simple labels on our food to satisfy a segment of American consumers,” SA noted. “Ultimately we are deciding whether we will continue to develop an immensely beneficial technology or shun it based on unfounded fears.”

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