This garden is for education. Hong Kong, a magnet for gourmets and food lovers the world over, has been besieged by food scares in recent years and local demand for healthier foods is clearly growing. Mainland Chinese vegetables, coated with excessive chemical pesticides, have landed people in hospitals while staples of the Chinese diet such as pork and fish have been found to be contaminated by banned growth drugs and pollutants. Of late, the worldwide controversy surrounding genetically modified food has gripped the territory of 6.8 million, triggering calls from green groups for compulsory labelling of GM food. In an effort to raise public awareness, local Greenpeace activists stormed into some supermarkets in recent months saying certain brands of soy and milk- chocolate products they sold contained GM ingredients.
More people now realize the issue and are beginning to ask questions.
Greenpeace's Lo Sze-ping asked. While there is no scientific evidence to prove GM food is harmful to human health, environmentalists argue there is also not sufficient evidence to show the release of GM organisms into the environment is safe. Hong Kong lawmakers this month passed a motion calling for compulsory GM food labelling and the government has said it would do a feasibility study on setting up such a system. Labels are required in the European Union and other countries where consumer resistance to biotech foods is greater. Up north in the rural New Territories and in Shenzhen, modest-sized organic farms have been quietly sprouting up, winning a small but growing band of faithful consumers.