Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-07-05-Speech-2-219-000"
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"en.20110705.34.2-219-000"2
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"Mr President, this is precisely the kind of sensitive issue that ought to be dealt with through the national democratic mechanisms and procedures of each state. I quite understand why it is an issue on which tempers run high; a number of my constituents feel that there is something intrinsically eerie about, let us say, a tomato that contains anti-freezing genes taken from arctic fish.
Personally I do not share those concerns; we have been practising genetic manipulation since Neolithic times. We have created for our convenience breeds which would not survive a day in the wild without human stewardship. If some cataclysm were to eradicate our species it would be the weeds that we have spent thousands of years fighting that would take over and the crops that we have spent thousands of years protecting that would be wiped out.
For example, we have created cattle that lactate in such quantities that they could not exist without human care; the ancestor of the modern chicken laid something like five eggs a year. But the point is that, wherever I stand on this, it should be up to individual consumers to make the choice themselves or, if we must have regulation, it should be national regulation, answerable through parliaments to people. You would have thought that with what is going on in Europe at the moment we would have had other things to worry about."@en1
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