«If we want to ensure a sufficient supply of high-quality domestic products, we have to protect plants from diseases, pests and weeds as efficiently as possible. If insect larvae are found on a product, an entire harvest may not be marketable. This is not sustainable when you consider the resources – land, water and fertiliser – that have already been used.»
Olivier Félix, Head of Sustainable Crop Protection at the Federal Office for Agriculture (BLW)
Migros Magazine, August 2024
«A catastrophe»: Greenpeace blocks planting of lifesaving Golden Rice. «It goes completely against the science, which has found no evidence of any risk associated with Golden Rice. This will result in thousands of unncessary child deaths.»
Matin Qaim, University of Bonn
«Land use for agriculture is inevitably related to loss of biodiversity. Management techniques such as use of Plant Protection Products have by definition a negative impact on biodiversity, but this loss is by far surpassed by the higher land use in extensive production systems.»
EPRS | European Parliamentary Research Service
«If we did not interfere with nature through modern technology, we would not have attained the quality of life we now enjoy»
National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) from the Philippines, 25 April 2024
«We are in the year 2024. If you really want to produce organic apples sustainably, you also have to allow new breeding methods»
Marco Messerli
Organic farmer calls for genome editing for fruit growing, February 12, 2024
«Crispr is being used in laboratories all over the world, not only in the fields of health, agriculture, climate change and synthetic biology, but also in diagnostics to detect coronavirus and other diseases.»
Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Prize winner
Using Crispr to combat climate change, December 11, 2023
«Up to one-fifth of all crops worldwide are currently lost to pests, and this is expected to rise to 25 percent due to climate change. While non-chemical control methods can have some success in reducing crop losses, pesticides remain a necessary weapon in our fight against devastating crop losses and this will remain the case for the foreseeable future.»
Linda Field, professor at Rothamsted Research
AgroPages, 9 February 2023
«Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but not a right to their own science.»
Dr. Joachim von Braun, Chair of the Scientific Group of the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS)
In a session at the UNFSS
If we want to produce more food within the planetary boundaries, this can only be achieved through higher productivity and increased crop yields. To achieve this, we need modern technology, which we should not close our minds to.
Matin Qaim, Agricultural economist at the University of Bonn
Handelsblatt, 31 March 2022
«If we deny facts, if we say that up is down and down is up, that left is right and right is left, we are obviously going to get lost. It's as simple as that, because science gives a direction. Science tells us what the facts are.»
Inger Andersen, Executive Director UN Environmental Program (UNEP)
UN News, 10 February 2021
«No, I smoke just enough that I hope I won't have to quit. According to Paracelsus, everything is poison, it just depends on the quantity.»
Katharina Prelicz-Huber, National Councillor, Grüne
Tages-Anzeiger, 28 January 2022
«Sometimes I have the feeling that a good engine oil is more important to us than a good salad oil.»
Cem Özdemir, German Minister of Agriculture and Food
foodaktuell, 28 December 2021
«Of course we found residues, that goes without saying. But they were only traces and not a health hazard.»
Christoph Spinner, Thurgau Canton Chemist
Thurgauer Zeitung, 31 December 2020
«We will not soon be able to feed ten billion people with an agriculture that used to feed one billion. What we need is not a romantic but a science-based agricultural turnaround.»
Matthias Berninger, Head of Sustainability Bayer AG
Bayer Presse DE, Twitter, 17 October 2020
«Plant protection is a technology that supports civilisation.»
Prof. Dr. Andreas von Tiedemann, Georg-August University Göttingen
Lecture at the CAS - Autumn Conference 2018 at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna
«Breeding in itself is not natural.»
Prof. Dr. Detlef Weigel, Director of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biology
Forschung & Lehre, Issue 1/2017
