Dr. C.S. Prakash, plant molecular genetics professor and director of the Center for Plant Biotechnology Research at Tuskegee University, AL, U.S.A. writes: 

"It is argued misleadingly that consumers globally are demanding the regulation of products, as if products improved through biotechnology are currently regulated in every country where they are grown, and they have been found to be at least as safe as their conventional counterparts. This type of scare mongering is what we’ve come to expect from groups like Greenpeace. 

Greepeace expresses concern over genetic manipulation, using such emotionally charged but scientifically indefensible terms as ‘genetic pollution’ and scare mongering about ‘irreversibility’ of crop releases. The truth is that humans have been genetically manipulating living things on this planet for as long as humans have existed, and to the enormous benefit of our species. With biotechnology, for the first time, we begin to understand just what it is we are doing, and hot to do it with a degree of safety and predictability we have never before enjoyed. Crops and foods improved through biotechnology are subjected to more scrutiny, in advance, in depth and detail, than any others in the history of the planet. Despite what Greenpeace wants us to believe, when farmers anywhere around the world have been given access to crops improved through biotechnology, they have snapped them up at historically unprecedented rates. 

Greenpeace’s claims of scientific support for their objections to biotechnology are as baseless as their claims of moral superiority as the sole arbiter of what is good for the planet. Vast experience shows they are contradicted by the facts. In the US, for example, the commercial cultivation of biotechnology-enhanced crops has reduced the use of insecticides and herbicides by 21 million kilograms every year, and also saved topsoil and other valuable resources. 

Greenpeace’s global budget was somewhere close to $117 million, which is less than their year 2000 income of $143.6 million. It must be noted, however, that the annual report on the Greenpeace website says that their 2000 total expenditures were $100.3 million plus $40.6 million in fundraising expenses, and their year 2000 expenditures on opposing genetic engineering were $7.1 million. 

According to various public records, tax filings and news reports, Greenpeace International’s millions comes from a range of sources including government funding, foundation grants (the foundation money often coming from various corporate sources), ‘donor-directed’ grants from other non-profits (the donors for which include corporations), directly from corporations such as Working Assets and Ben & Jerry’s which give a percentage of sales to Greenpeace. 

As the Canadian government officials have discovered, Greenpeace is no small dollar grassroots, non-profit movement, rather it is part of a multi-billion dollar protest industry. Canada has caught on to Greenpeace’s game and revoked its charitable status noting their lack of demonstrable public benefit, thereby preventing people and corporations from taking tax deductions for contributions to the group. 

In addition, Greenpeace leaders have close financial relationships (both personal and professional) with the organic food industry’s marketing interests against biotech foods in Europe and the US as evidenced by Organic Farmer Lord Peter Melchet’s (also director of Greenpeace UK) immediate move to work for Iceland Foods as a highly paid lobbyist. Agence France Presse also reported that Greenpeace Brazil went so far as to license their own line of organic products in that country."