PepsiCo's 2009 shareholder proxy report contains a proposal (pg. 61) that paints a clear picture of the company's use of genetically-engineered (GE) food ingredients and its attitude toward this issue. The proposal describes a loose plan to remove GE ingredients from Pepsi's products in order to maintain "Company product integrity." The concern, archived for public record in the report, is that Pepsi products contain "potentially GE" corn, rice, canola, soy and sugar.

The controversy of GE crops is not a new one. For years, proponents of the biotech industry have maintained that GE crops are completely safe for human consumption and will benefit the world, while campaigners against GE foods have contended that the long-term dangers of this branch of science are unknown and uncontrolled. We now know that GE crops can pose extreme dangers for human consumption, animal consumption and for the biodiversity of the environment.

The report cites twelve well-documented incidences or studies in which the dangers of GE crops are clearly demonstrated. The evidence includes a 2007 study conducted in Paris, France, where rats were fed GE corn made by US biotech giant Monsanto. The results, which were published in the journal Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, were very unfavorable for the corn. The rats showed "signs of toxicity" in the kidneys and liver and developed problems in those organs.

In 2005, a GE pea developed by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization provoked a strong immune response in laboratory rats when tested by scientists from the John Curtin Medical Research School in the city of Canberra. The tests carried out on the pea were of the kind normally undertaken on drugs, not on food. US law does not require this kind of testing and so it is highly probable that the pea would have been approved if it were tested in the US. The findings were published in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2005). The study concluded that, "These investigations, however, demonstrate that transgenic expression of non-native proteins in plants may lead to the synthesis of structural variants with altered immunogenicity." In other words, GE plants can lead to unpredictable immune responses in humans.

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