Wall Street Journal Online - Opinion March 19, 2016
Notable & Quotable: Mitch Daniels on Anti-GMO Cruelty "You have a positive duty" to "contest and refute junk science and false claims." Excerpts: Adapted from after-dinner remarks by Purdue University President Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. at the Agriculture Department Agricultural Outlook Forum in Arlington, Va., Feb. 25: .. .. .. .. .. .. Two or three decades ago we were all told that we would have starved by now. That the world was going to run out of food, there wasn't anything anyone could do about it. Everyone in this room knows that instead, the intervening decades have seen the greatest upward surge for the good of humanity in the history of the planet Earth. That the combination of greater freedom in important countries and technology has brought down the number of undernourished - our undernourished brothers and sisters - by hundreds of millions, even as population grew by billions. And now, of course, having climbed a mountain that people said was insurmountable, we all face the next one. Nine billion people, in an historical blink from now, maybe three decades. There are huge threats, impediments, to our climbing the mountain of feeding a world of nine billion fellow humans, but they are not the ones we've known in the past. The threat this time is internal. It will be a self inflicted wound. What is troubling me, and I hope troubles you, is that there is a shockingly broad, and so far shockingly successful, movement that threatens this important ascent of humankind out of the condition that has plagued us since we first walked upright: of having enough food to meet the most basic, the most elementary need of any living species. That threatens our ascent by choking off the very technologies that could make that next great triumph possible.
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