Jim Thomas
Key Player

Genetic engineering campaign director, Greenpeace USAJim Thomas has made a career out of trashing genetically improved foods, those produced with technologies that the European Union has called “even safer than conventional plants and foods.” He started out in 1996 working with the Genetic Engineering Network in Britain, and then became a food campaigner for Greenpeace UK, the organization’s British subset. Thomas contributes to several anti-technology publications, including Resurgence, GenEthics News, Splice, and The Ecologist.

Thomas was a leading participant in “Biodevastation 2000,” an anti-genetic improvement conference that included folks like Andrew Kimbrell of the Center for Food Safety and Canadian canola farmer Percy Schmeiser, who was sued by Monsanto last year for using Monsanto’s genetically improved crop seed without paying the licensing fee — in short, for theft — and was fined $20,000 by the Federal Court of Canada.

Thomas is now based at the Greenpeace USA office in San Francisco, and from there has spearheaded the campaign to vandalize food products on grocery shelves by slapping “biohazard” labels on them. He’s also the owner of the website www.LabelThis.org, which tells activists when and how to go on labeling raids. But Thomas’s name does not appear on the site, nor does any organization’s name. This seems to be an effort to present “LabelThis” as a grassroots movement, and also to maintain a veil of anonymity so the Greenpace-inspired criminals can’t be caught.