a lot of people have asked me why a state law why should minnesota pass a law to label g m o's just in our state and should it be a national effort and my answer to them is it absolutely should be a national effort ultimately it still is a national effort but what has happened is that there ha been labeling drives on the national level and they have not been successful yet the f d a received more than a million comments more than they ever had before asking them to require labels on g m o foods and they did nothing so i think when that happened a lot of us on the state level started realizing it's not going to happen on the national level the industry is just too powerful on the national level to actually get any positive change to happen right you know minnesota is a group of people  farmers consumers organizations we're really hoping to build a broad coalition of people who care about food and who want genetically modified foods labeled so there's several reasons that we should know foods do i think that your rules are necessary to feed the world will know me the best way to feed the world is to feed yourself is to grow a garden and to raise food for your own family and for others that's by far the most productive use of land and in developing countries by switching to soil building practice of composting green manure you can increase food production a one hundred eighty percent the studies show without the use of g m owes  all and the problem with g m owes in developing countries is these are patented so people have to go back and buy high priced seeds year after year so they're shipping a lot of their money out of their own countries whereas if they're saving their seeds and building their soil they're more resilient to claim a change to droughts to natural disasters once they have the resources they are reinvesting in their own economies and feeding healthier products to their people so i think it's the investment in g m o's is a good way to to enrich the stockholders of the companies that own the technology but it's certainly not necessary to feed the people of the world world hunger is not so much related to yield and productivity as it is to economics and just political inequality and waste a lot of food is wasted so we have we can't separate hunger from economics and politics those have much more impact than just a old and if you look at the reality right now over a third of the u s corn crop is actually going to ethanol to feed our cars so we're not feeding that corn the biotech corn to people it's being fed to our cars and to livestock not to human beings so most of the g m o crops are not even food there are industrial crowds they're not being used to feed people it's better to help people grow gardens and feed themselves rather than to import patented technologies that take money out of their economies institute that found out that a number of cereals that claim to be natural actually are loaded with cmos this one for example says it has as much protein as an egg and has about ninety percent g m o so i was really shocked by this because i think of them as a natural brand i realize now that i had this sort of bought into the same marketing that everybody else does so i complain to kashi as many other people have done something actually to talk to the ledge about no longer carrying the cereal as well and i have sent stop buying the cereal another cereal i used to buy that i no longer buy is mom's best naturals i actually called them and asked them if they containing if they're serious contain him rose and they could not say that they didn't which means they probably do and there's a lot of cereals so there really have particular concern i think if most moms knew that they were feeding their children genetically modified corn and soy every day they would make some different decisions about their breakfast cereal we just need to make g m o free food widespread and not something that only a few people can afford so i think labeling g m o this would just create more widespread use of g m o free foods and make them more available to everybody i think to the extent that some parents are not yet thinking about the issue of genetically modified foods part of the reason for that is because they really don't have an other options in the grocery store so i think god labeling genetically modified foods would actually give them options and give them choices and i think that's what they would ideally like certainly if they knew anything about some of the animal studies that have connected g m o foods to health concerns they would stop and think twice before they bought those foods and fed them to their children so i think if they had access to other foods they would choose other foods and that would follow what would happen to farmers if most were labeled well we have to keep in mind this whole development of g m o foods is really very recent it's only been about fifteen years that these products have been on the market and so you know farmers were growing non g m o crowds for many many years and they could certainly shift back to g m o crops if that's where the market was out the problem is right now a lot of the  the smaller seed company has of all been bought up their genetics are all being controlled by the companies that own the g m o's and sell and they promote the g m o is because they're patented and they can charge much higher price and there's a lot of backlash amongst farmers for the exorbitant prices that companies the biotech companies are charging for their seeds so we could get back to less expensive seeds and i think farmers would welcome that they would have more control they'd be able to save their own seeds again for certain crops which they're not allowed to do now so it would open up a lot of opportunities and certainly for gannett farmers who don't use dmoz to began with you know i think they would suffer less potential for harm from drift and contamination issues and they would have access to more varieties of seeds as more non g m o seeds are on the conventional market that means that those genetics are of be lowball in the public domain so i think there's you know it's a mixed bag farmers would have to make some changes to their operation but agriculture is changing all the time and it's changed dramatically in the last fifteen years and it will change dramatically in the next fifteen years and there's over sixty countries that require the labeling of foods from most right now so it would bring the u s kind of into the twenty first century and you know in line with our trading partners you know we've lost some world markets share because we're just trying to force the most onto the world market and a lot of the markets are saying no thanks we don't want products grown in the u s so it could really be a boon to agriculture to go back to for however odd that biotech industry is working on creating a genetically engineered salmon so the salmon itself in that case would be genetically engineered under the minnesota law that would require  consumer based movement to really help educate legislators and other policymakers about the genetically engineered foods are about and why the labeling just again getting the basic rate you know moderate position on the right to  know without it coming from the grassroots it probably won't change you know i think tell you the legislature it's really important sometimes when you get like three or four people making a phone call about a particular issue because i always tell my constituents and others if you're calling me about four or five people calling me that means there are four or five hundred people who probably share your viewpoint because it's true that most of our citizens most of the people  we represent don't ever really bother to call us and his assistant so i always know that if i get you know five call played in the same must be a lot more people out there who really are concerned about this and i've had tension to that issue and have even individual calls just a time sometimes when you know that it's the timing is there and people more and more in our country and see what to know they just want to know what's going on and the rate is so basic i believe the momentum is gathering and it's not a partisan issue people on both sides of the aisle how many sides of the aisle i think can agree that concern is right to know something so basic as what's in  food whether nothing is genetically modified materials genetic engineering foods that are being sold to them is just again real basic right this is for so i think it's a great time to get healthy i want all children have access and all people have access to healthy