“We are disappointed that Anheuser-Busch didn’t simply come clean and join other major brewing concerns, like Heineken, that have gone GE free,” says Professor Doreen Stabinsky from Greenpeace International.

“Anheuser-Busch’s threat of legal action is no way to address the public concerns. The solution is for Anheuser-Busch to reassure its customers in the US and abroad about the purity of its product. It’s a simple question of the right to know.”

Greenpeace has published its correspondence with A-B and to tell you the truth, it doesn’t look very good for A-B..

“Because it’s so new that man cross breeds different crops, I don’t know what the big deal is on this we have been it for thousands of years, now that the term geneticly modified it has become demonized.”

If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you imply that man has been cross-breeding plants for thousands of years, and therefore we shouldn’t be afraid of GMO’s. I hate to break it to you, but there’s a HUGE difference between “old-fashioned” selective breeding, and introducing new genes into a place they were never meant to be. Liberty Link rice has been specifically designed to resist AgrEvo’s Liberty herbicide. This is a gene that was created in a lab and introduced into the plant; there’s no possible way they could have cross-bred anything to achieve this new species because this resistance doesn’t occur in nature. Thus, it bears no similarity to the processes and techniques that farmers have been using for thousands of years to create better, higher-yielding crops.

Even scarier than the genetic modification itself is the reason they did it; namely to increase the plants’ resistance to Liberty so that industrial farms can dump even more toxic chemicals into the soil without harming their crops.

My biggest concern is that this branch of scientific research is so new that there’s no way to be sure what the long-term effects will be. How many years did they use DDT (and claim it was safe) before birds started having soft-shell eggs and women began giving birth to deformed kids? 20? 40?

Ugh.

To my mind the Greenpeace image you’ve posted is embarrassing even if one has no issue with GM crops – simply because it reminds consumers the beer is made partly with rice.

In a statement attributed to Group VP Doug Muhleman, A-B states that the Greenpeace claims are “false and defamatory,” that this is in retaliation for refusing a Greenpeace call to boycott farmers who grow GMO crops, that the rice they use passes all US gov’t standards, and that the “micro levels of Liberty Link proteins” (which I assume is a genetically modified rice strain) are “substantially removed or destroyed by the brewing process.”

Well. Speaking as someone who tends not to give a damn about GMO crop, this sounds like a tempest in a pisspot to me.

If you don’t want to touch GMO corn syrup, don’t drink a US made soda again.

I think labeling is fine, inform the customer but let the market decide.

Reminds me of this recent story.
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/08/greenpeace-poisons-hungry-crowd-or-not.html

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/bayer-cropscience-contaminates

Lew