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'Anti-GMO claims are myths' former anti-GMO activist Mark Lynas
By REGINA LAYUG-ROSEROAugust 28, 2013 8:11pm
Many people spend years defending a truth they believe in. Some are willing to lay down their lives and fight what they believe is a good fight.
For British author and environmentalist Mark Lynas, that fight was against genetically modified crops. But not anymore.
Fighting against GMOs
Mark Lynas at the media discussion titled, "Meeting the Challenges of Food Security with Biotechnology," organized by SEARCA, ISAAA, and ABSP, at the Dusit Hotel in Makati on August 23. All photos from the organizers
It was in 1996 when Lynas first learned about GMOs, according to an article on The Guardian. He became a member of an organization 'loosely called' Earth First! "By the time of Earth First!'s next gathering, GMOs had 'become the next big thing," said Lynas, who led the early workshops that spread the message further. "The people who consider themselves leaders in the anti-GM movement today, I trained them."
By 1997, Lynas was participating in the destruction of GM crops, what anti-GM organizations call direct action."
Around the time of the London May Day riots of the year 2000, which he helped organize, Lynas began to have doubts. "I thought it was a disaster. Everything we'd been trying to achieve was undermined by all the violence and window smashing. It just alienated people. Tolerance and open-mindedness were qualities that people paid lip service to but were not really valued."
Conversion
Lynas is a historian and political scientist by education, and a journalist by training. "I moved from being an activist campaigner to a science writer," he said. "I began authoring books on climate change, beginning in 2004 with a book called High Tide, then another book called Six Degrees in 2007. Both of these books were based very much on a broad reading of the scientific literature. So each one has hundreds of references, mostly to peer-reviewed scientific papers."
"I was really in the process of writing my latest book, called God Species, that I changed my mind on this issue. I was starting a chapter on agriculture which I intended to be anti-GMO, and when I looked at all of the science across the board in all of the different journals, I found that there was no factual basis for what I previously believed. So the chapter ended up being kind of pro-GMO. The more I looked into it, the more I realized that biotechnology could be a major step forward in a positive direction for the environment."
All the science-based information he found was in complete opposition with what he had believed for years.
Lynas has received recognition as a science writer. "Six Degrees was made into a film by National Geographic. I received a prize from the Royal Society for science books. I was pleased to get recognition from the scientific community but at the same time I was still making statements against GMOs which had no scientific basis."
According to Lynas, anti-GMO claims are anti-science. "This is a very clearly anti-scientific agenda which is being advanced. There is no scientific basis to any of these rumors. People have been told that GM cassava and other crops will turn them sterile, will make their children homosexuals, some kind of Western conspiracy. And so these conspiracy theories, these lies are undermining the food security of innocent people."
In a live, televised debate in 2010, he defended GMOs and nuclear power. But he truly 'came out' with the truth about his conversion early this year, when he spoke at the Oxford Farming Conferencean event he previously denouncedand apologized for his actions.
"I apologize for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment," went part of his speech.
That speech became so controversial and widely read that his website, on which he had posted the full text, crashed.
Now Lynas speaks on the importance of biotechnology for food security, especially in worldwide efforts to cope with climate change.