Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin isn’t just disputing a technical claim about biotech; he’s attacking the sales pitch. The line is built like a courtroom move: not a spreadsheet, but “quite a few farmers all over the United States” as character witnesses. That phrasing matters. It bypasses the lab and the regulatory hearing and goes straight to the supposed end-user, implying that whatever the industry’s trials say, lived experience is delivering a different verdict.

The specific intent is to puncture a widely marketed promise: that genetically engineered crops (especially herbicide-tolerant varieties) would reduce chemical use. By insisting farmers “have to use more herbicides, not less,” Rifkin frames the technology as a treadmill, not a breakthrough - a system that escalates inputs over time. The subtext is about power and dependency: if farmers must keep adding sprays to keep up with resistant weeds, the “innovation” is really a lock-in mechanism that benefits chemical and seed companies.

“The same holds true with BT” is a strategic bridge. Bt crops were promoted as a way to cut insecticide applications by embedding pest resistance in the plant. Rifkin’s move is to collapse distinctions between different biotech traits, suggesting a single pattern: early gains followed by ecological pushback (resistance) and management creep (additional chemicals, stacked traits). Contextually, this sits in the 1990s-2000s public fight over GMOs, where the core battle wasn’t only safety, but credibility: whose evidence counts, and who gets to define “progress” when biology, markets, and farmer practice collide.