Reversing Judgement

"I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, 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. As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely. So I guess you'll be wondering: What happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist."
Mark Lynas, British environmentalist

That's the kind of mea culpa that is rare indeed and one that must have been bitterly painful to have served as an elocution exercise, but it was one that was delivered in humble style at the Oxford Farming Conference.  His address at the conference was posted on line.  This was a man with a reputation who helped the anti-[GMO movement initiate and gain momentum. 

The belief that big corporations were indulging in the kind of greed that would threaten the health of people and the environment found a wide and appreciative audience.

He and his cohorts successfully convinced governments world wide - with a special emphasis on Western Europe, Asia and Africa - that genetically modified food was a dangerous interference with nature that would have severe consequences.  In so doing he and they managed to hold back important GM research, causing in the process NGOs like Greenpeace to turn down donations of genetically modified foods. 

The European Union, long disfavouring GM foods, finally relented and released member-states to make their own decisions.

Mark Lynas has done a complete turn-about.  The GM foods he once decried as dangerous is now, in his opinion, the answer to world food shortages.  Important in the battle to feed a world population steadily increasing in size, with the complication of an emerging middle class in once-impoverished countries who now demand better quality food.  Now he says, society must take advantage of all agricultural advances and technologies available, with the inclusion of GMOs. 

A desire to rely exclusively on "natural" foods will doom people to starvation.

"The GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe ...  You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food", is his new mantra.  And never too late, it seems.  It is as yet unknown whether his turn-about will prove to be sufficiently persuasive to his former GMO-denying colleagues to entice them to join him and lay down the GM cudgel.

Or accuse him of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.