Dick Durbin Quotes

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

When people say they prefer organic food, what they often seem to mean is they don't want their food tainted with pesticides and their meat shot full of hormones or antibiotics. Many object to the way a few companies - Monsanto is the most famous of them - control so many of the seeds we grow.

Perhaps never in the history of a nation founded by agrarian self-starters has the federal government propped up rural America to such a degree.

Farm subsidies are a matter of national food security

One of the really remarkably beneficial aspects of genetic engineering is that much of the previous methodology for controlling pests and so forth is through chemicals that affect a very broad spectrum of insects, for example, or fungicides that control fungi.

I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature.

Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.

We wouldn't have to speak so critically if businesses would stop feeding dead animals to live ones, putting non-food substances into food, tinkering with genetic codes, and spraying the countryside with poisons.

It is obvious that the greatest and most important service that is required of our agriculture under existing conditions is an enlarged production of the staple food crops.

The battle over genetically modified crops is rife with business interests and political opportunism. When GMOs were first produced in laboratories around the world, they were rightly heralded as a tremendous leap forward in our ability to supplement nature by providing high-nutrient foods.

Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 - twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners.

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

Could we do without the social safety net, without Social Security, without Medicare, without farm subsidies, without unemployment compensation, without school lunch programs, without housing assistance? Of course we could. But we would not be a civilized society and we would not be an American nation any of us would be proud of.

We don't pay truckers not to truck, we don't pay miners not to mine and we shouldn't pay farmers not to farm.

[Defending agricultural subsidies:] France is the world's second-biggest exporter of agriculture products, and it must remain so.

Agricultural science is largely the contest between emerging pests and the emerging methods of their control.

President Lincoln’s biggest blunder was—no not General George McClellan—creating the Agriculture Department. Since 1995, 75 percent of all agricultural subsidies have gone to the largest and wealthiest 10 percent of farms.

Farm subsidies are a waste of money.

Farm subsidies are bribes for votes.

What our family has done is participate in the farm programs … programs I think essentially almost every farmer in South Dakota has participated in those, and they haven't been bailouts, they have been programs that the United States has put forward for farmers to participate in.

When they [most people] get a [government] benefit, they assume that God gave them it to them, But most people don’t want to pay for someone else’s undeserved benefits.

Middle-income countries are the biggest users of GMOs. Places like Brazil.

The unmerited fear of genetically modified organism crops threatens scientific advancements in biotechnology needed to meet the growing global demand for safe and affordable food.

Let's not pretend we're in a global free market when it comes to agriculture. Every country protects, for good reason, its agricultural industries.