Former organic farmer and USDA inspector: Time for National Organic Program to allow GMO crops

Editor’s note: Mischa Popoff is a former USDA organic inspector and farmer

Organic activists would like you to believe their brand pre-exists in nature the way fresh air and clean water do. It does not. It only exists because we have come up with a legal framework by which to define it.

If we were to decide tomorrow that certain GMOs would be acceptable as organic, as President Bill Clinton and many leading academics suggest, we could rewrite the law. But the activists propound the notion that GMOs “contaminate” organic crops, as if we’re talking about dumping effluents into a pristine stream of brook trout. We’re not. We’re talking about politics, plain and simple.

Organic activists aim to sideline agricultural genetic engineering and prevent GMO farming from moving forward. It’s a devious gambit that’s worked marvelously: GMO flax, wheat, Golden Rice and innate potatoes are all on the sideline, some for more than a decade.

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The time has come for organic activists to stop creating controversy where none exists and for us all to look forward to the day when we might even see the world’s first certified-organic, genetically-modified crop. After all, it’s a matter of choice.