I don't think anyone here would argue that it isn't within the public's right to legislate such things. Certainly, we have no provision in the constitution forbidding such labels, explicitly or implicitly. The question is, it is a beneficial contribution to our society to have it? Take, for example, an ingredients list. We require disclosure of all components used in making food. The primary benefit is that people with a food allergy or other kind of dietary requirement can make sure they don't consume food that will really hurt their health.
The goal of such labeling is to create a stigmatization of GMO crops. You can say it's all about consumer choice, but embedded in there is the assumption that there is something bad about genetically engineered food. This statement is, as far as anyone has been able to show in controllable experiments, entirely unsupported.
We are left, then, with the following cost/benefit analysis for stigmatizing GMOs:
Pros:
- Consumers are able to make an arbitrary choice on their purchases.
- Monsanto makes a bit less money. (Is this a benefit?)
Cons:
- Crop yields go down, meaning that we tear up more wilderness to make our food.
- We produce more CO2 to make our food.
- We use more insecticide per hectare of land.
- Lower, less stable incomes for farmers.
- Certain foods, such as the papaya and the orange, become unavailable or very expensive due to to disease.
- Potentially wonderful humanitarian developments, such as golden rice, protein-containing cassava, and rice that can grow in contaminated soil, will not receive funding and/or will be shunned by other countries following our lead.
I think people forget how important technology is to food production. As anyone old enough will tell you, we were convinced the
world was going to starve just 50 years ago. The reason it didn't was Norman Borlaug and the
Green Revolution. Now there were certainly consequences to the introduction of pesticides (particularly DDT), but they were far, far, outweighed by the billion lives it likely saved. Things like BT corn and cotton provide much of the benefits of the green revolution without the consequences. Other developments have the ability to drastically increase the nutritional value of our staple crops.
Before you jump in with "but genetic engineering changes plants in ways we don't understand", realize that any changes made this way are much smaller than those we create through selective breeding. Take wheat, for instance. Most wild species of wheat are diploidic, meaning that they contain two copies of their genetic code (like us). This wheat, while reasonably nutritious, doesn't contain enough gluten to make any kind of bread beyond a tortilla. In order to make the wheat more easily consumable, it has been repeatedly hybridized to either tetraploidic (four copies, durum wheat) or hexaploidic (six copies, bread wheat). That means that one plant of "modern" (i.e. last 10k years) wheat contains the genetic content of at least three wild plants. This is a far more drastic change than what we do with genetic engineering, yet no one worries about it. If you want other examples, look at strawberries (hybrid species), almonds (wild almonds contain a substantial amount of cyanide), corn (the wild ancestor is almost inedible and tiny), and apples (since they are triploidic, nearly all members of an apple variety are grafted clones). You'll find the amount of genetic modification we've done to our food well before this century to be astounding.
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