Labeling/Banning GMO-We're Getting Close

Q: We mentioned the difference between the United States and Europe when it comes to genetically modified foods, and is there a movement in the United States? Are we getting to the point where you can see that we may at least have labeling or restricting the use of them in our food source, in the United States?

A: The news from the US is quite good. We have seen an unprecedented upsurge of consumer awareness and concern about GMOs. We think as little as 5% of US shoppers avoiding GM ingredients would be sufficient to create a tipping point, turning GMOs into a pure marketing liability. Remember, there's no consumer benefits. Either drink poison or produce poison.

So no one wakes up in the morning to say, "I want my daily dose of Roundup and BT." So, what he have a situation here is that as the awareness grows about GMOs, more people are demanding labeling, so there's been an upsurgence of the demand for labeling in 37 states. There's been ballot initiatives in bills, et cetera. We see a demand for non-GMO products and the non-GMO label was the fastest-growing label claim for health in the United States in 2012, one of the fastest for the last four years.

As the only person that's been criss-crossing the US for 11 years about the dangers of GMOs, speaking all over, I've seen unprecedented awareness and pockets of activism that we've never seen before. So I'm very confident that we're going to hit the tipping point soon, but we need people to help.

So we have ResponsibleTechnology.org, which is from our Institute for Responsible Technology, where people can sign up for a newsletter and hear how to get involved. They can sign up for our tipping point network. They can take speaker training. There's a lot of materials online that can focus their outreach to their community, to religious people, to health-conscious shoppers, to parents, to patients, to doctors. So, we have a whole array of empowering people with information and strategy and working with others so that we can create a tipping point more quickly.