Contact:
Kristine J. P. Schaefer, Ph.D.
Iowa State University Pesticide Safety Education Program
Phone: 515 294-4286
schaefer@iastate.edu
St. Louis, MO – Jon Entine, Founding Director of the Genetic Literacy Project and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy (IFAC) at University of California-Davis, delivered the keynote address at the annual meeting of The Pesticide Stewardship Alliance held February 9-11, 2016 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
As a champion of sustainability and a self-described contrarian, Jon Entine has been actively defending genetically-modified foods and agricultural practices for more than 15 years. Entine’s address “GMOs, Chemicals and Modern Agriculture: If You Try to Ban the Future It Will Just Happen Somewhere Else”, detailed concerns over the misinformation surrounding modern agricultural practices being delivered around the world. Entine also outlined the potential impact this misinformation could have on future agriculture technologies and developments.
“Unfortunately, the science literacy argument doesn’t change minds in the GMO debate” says Entine. “It requires a combination of caring and patience to convince those supporting anti-GMO groups that GMOs are beneficial.” Entine recommends posing this question, “How do you plan to feed the projected 40 billion world population by 2100?”
Serving as a contributing columnist at Forbes, Huffington Post and the UK-based Ethical Corporation magazine, Entine has contributed to hundreds of newspapers, magazines and websites around the world.
Entine’s work with the IFAC also supports the joint GLP-UC Davis project GENeS: Genetic Expert News Service, connecting journalists directly to scientists on breaking controversies. He is also a long-time visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.
In 2014, Entine spoke before the National Academy of Sciences on the issue of GMO safety and has written or edited seven books, including: Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics is Undermining the Genetic Revolution in Agriculture (2005) and Crop Chemophobia: Will Precaution Kill the Green Revolution (2011).
