A nice little Monday morning visit with our old friends at Monsanto. During our last visit we discovered that their Genetically Modified (GM) crops marketed as Roundup Ready® were suffering from newly-evolved “superweeds” that had acquired a resistance to the pesticide Roundup® and the whole scheme was becoming a nightmare for farmers locked into Monsanto’s ag system.
You’ll recall that Monsanto’s response to the problem was to formulate another pesticide (a cocktail containing Roundup® as before, but now fortified with 2,4-D, one of the main active ingredients in Agent Orange) along with newly engineered seedstock with a genetic resistance to the new cocktail.
Onward now to the ongoing (for many years) battle to mandate labeling on foodstuffs that are, or that contain, GM crops. Let’s first note that a majority of people in the US support mandatory labeling. Poll after poll (here’s just one, there are scores of them) show the level of support to be upward of 90%. What’s amazing is that this is even under debate at all — hardly anyone would say that a producer should have the right not to disclose what is in the products they are spending millions of dollars marketing as food. But that is exactly the position taken by the big ag companies, most notably our old buddy Monsanto.
We all know why. Many people are suspicious of GM foods, and feel that the safety testing has been inadequate or otherwise suspect. A fair few just don’t like the idea as a matter of personal philosophy, and would never knowingly ingest them. Many others feel that the products are probably safe enough, but even in that group the majority say that the producers have an obligation to inform the consumer.
Dubya displays his Genetically Modified carrot, and cops a quick feel from one of the market workers.
Monsanto fears that if there was a legal requirement to label all foods that contained their products then sales would crater. It really is that simple. We know this because they have said so many years ago;
“If you put a label on genetically engineered food you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it.” – Norman Braksick, president of Asgrow Seed Co., a subsidiary of Monsanto, quoted in the Kansas City Star, March 7, 1994
“Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.” — Phil Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications, quoted in the New York Times, October 25, 1998
That would be the same FDA whose funding the GOP would gut if they could manage to do so, by the way.
It’s about money. That’s it. The perfectly normal and sensible desires of more than 90% of consumers to be reliably informed of what they are eating are subordinated to the financial aspirations of a small group of very large and politically powerful agricultural corporations.
This fight has been going on now for more than 20 years. How is it, we might reasonably ask, that with that kind of popular support this whole issue was not a slam-dunk?
The way it’s supposed to work with those kinds of numbers is that the elected representatives take the desires of the people into the legislative process and just make it happen. It’s not as if such legislation would be restricting anyone’s free choices for crissakes, in fact the reverse is quite obviously true. In the present situation the free choice as to whether to consume GM foods or not is impossible. It can be labeled any way the producers want, even as “Natural”, which is common practice and which is a carefully focus-grouped and emotive word that means nothing at all.
How did this happen? Here’s a casebook study of how, using a current case in Vermont as an example of a strategy that Monsanto et al has pursued resolutely since day one….
….First, you send “experts” to lie through their teeth at the hearings;
During the hearings the Vermont legislature was deluged with calls, letters, and e-mails urging passage of a GMO labeling bill – more than on any other bill since the fight over Civil Unions in 1999-2000. The legislature heard from pro-labeling witnesses such as Dr. Michael Hansen, an expert on genetic engineering from the Consumers Union, who shredded industry claims that GMO’s are safe and that consumers don’t need to know if their food is contaminated with them.
On the other side of the fence, Monsanto’s lobbyist and Vermont mouthpiece, Margaret Laggis employed inaccurate, unsubstantiated, fear-mongering claims to make Monsanto’s case. She warned during the hearings that if this law were passed, there would not be enough corn, canola, and soybean seed for Vermont farmers to plant.
Laggis lied when she said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had done exhaustive feeding tests on genetically modified foods. Hansen corrected her, testifying that all of the GMO feeding tests submitted to the FDA were conducted by Monsanto and other GMO corporations and that the FDA had not done any GMO testing of its own.
Laggis lied again when she claimed that a recent Canadian study showing that more than 90% pregnant women had high levels of a genetically modified bacterial pesticide in their blood resulted from them “eating too much organic food” during pregnancy. Again, Hansen refuted this nonsense by pointing out that the Bacillus thuringensis (Bt) bacterium spray used by organic growers is chemically and materially different from the GMO Bt bacterium which showed up in the pregnant women’s blood and the umbilical cords of their fetuses. Hanson pointed that the high levels of Monsanto’s mutant Bt in the women’s blood was due to the widespread cultivation of GMO corn, cotton, soy, and canola.
Monsanto has been doing this for 20 years and more, all over the country, whenever a legislature is considering a bill to mandate labeling. It’s standard procedure. Sometimes it works, but sometimes the proponents of the labeling laws are prepared to trade punches, as in this Vermont case;
The committee heard testimony that European Union studies have been conducted which showed that even short-term feeding studies of GMO crops caused 43.5% of male test animals to suffer kidney abnormalities, and 30.8% of female test animals to suffer liver abnormalities. Studies also have shown that the intestinal lining of animals fed GMO food was thickened compared to the control animals. All of these short-term results could become chronic, and thus precursors to cancer.
Studies like these have prompted 50 nations around the world to pass laws requiring mandatory labels on GMO foods.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going, and Monsanto is tough. When fabrications and misrepresentations don’t work, it’s time to deploy the backup plan that has yet to fail. Sue their asses off. Vermont, one of the most progressive States in the country in many ways, has very good reason to know how this game is played;
When Vermont became the first state in the nation in 1994 to require mandatory labels on milk and dairy products derived from cows injected with the controversial genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone, Monsanto’s minions sued in Federal Court and won on a judge’s decision that dairy corporations have the first amendment “right” to remain silent on whether or not they are injecting their cows with rBGH – even though rBGH has been linked to severe health damage in cows and increased cancer risk for humans, and is banned in much of the industrialized world, including Europe and Canada.
Let’s pause to savor the salient feature of that paragraph just once more — a corporation has the “right to remain silent” about what they are shooting their cows up with, then sell you the milk, even though there is plenty of non-trivial evidence that harm may occur, and other technologically advanced nations have banned the practice as a result of that evidence of harm!
So that’s what Monsanto has done again in Vermont — brought in the legal heavies;
Despite overwhelming public support and support from a clear majority of Vermont’s Agriculture Committee, Vermont legislators are dragging their feet on a proposed GMO labeling bill. Why? Because Monsanto has threatened to sue the state if the bill passes.
The popular legislative bill requiring mandatory labels on genetically engineered food (H-722) is languishing in the Vermont House Agriculture Committee, with only four weeks left until the legislature adjourns for the year. Despite thousands of emails and calls from constituents who overwhelmingly support mandatory labeling, despite the fact that a majority (6 to 5) of Agriculture Committee members support passage of the measure, Vermont legislators are holding up the labeling bill and refusing to take a vote.
This whole issue is unlikely to be even peripheral in the upcoming election campaigns. But then again maybe not. Monsanto isn’t giving up the fight, but then neither is anyone else. Activists have taken a leaf out of the “life begins at conception” crowd’s playbook, and are now pushing for a ballot initiative in California.
A broad and growing coalition of health, environment and consumer advocacy groups are now coming together to fight back, including the Organic Consumers Association, Organic Consumers Fund, Food Democracy Now!, Mercola.com, Nature’s Path, Lundberg Family Farms, LabelGMOs.org, Eden Foods, Alliance for Natural Health, Dr. Bronner’s, United Farm Workers Union, American Public Health Association, Cornucopia Institute, Institute for Responsible Technology, Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network, California Certified Organic Farmers, and scores of others.
Naturally enough the industry is manning the ramparts too, and Monsanto, the Farm Bureau, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association – under the wing of its front group with the Rovianesque title of the Coalition Against the Costly Food Law – are amassing financial resources to defeat the initiative.
No way to know how this will all play out. But it should never have come to this. The idea that consumers should not have the right to know what is in their food, and how it is produced, is too preposterous to discuss. That the consumers’ rights should be eclipsed by an entirely spurious “right” of the producers to “remain silent” is not only preposterous, but frankly obscene.
Meanwhile, shop carefully, and support your local farmer if you can. Check around for a Community Supported Agriculture operation in you neighborhood. And don’t just shut up and eat it.
Paris is beautiful in Spring!
So what are you saying, Gunny, you want to trample on the liberty of a person like Monsanto -it is a person, right? Mittens keeps telling me it is, and the more I hear him say it, like, the more I believe it- you want to trample on this person’s right to keep what he -or is Monsanto a she? How do you figure out the sex of a corporate person? Is is like beavers (I means the dam-building kind- and you have to actually dissect them to find the geneitalia?) When they ‘merge’ do they, you know, exhibit their junk even then?
Oh right, GM labeling. Keep in mind it won’t be the person called Monsanto who will be selling the labeled product. It will be the farmers who grow it, or, rather more likely, the stores which sell the produce to the consumer, who will have to attach that pesky label, and aren’t they people too? And don’t they have rights? To not say if the diribonucleic acid in the fruit and veg has been altered in a lab as opposed to cross-bred in the field? What’s next, you going to require them to say what variety of carrot they are selling? Akaroa Long Red, Altrincham, Amsterdam Forcing, Artist, Autumn King,
Barwon, Baby Bell, Belgian White, Bolero, Chantenay Crusader, Danvers, Doucer, Early Horn,etc? All those have unique DNA, too right? And if I sell some it is my right- by way of the word of God Almighty (as whispered in the ear of Alexander Hamilton) to keep the name a secret. If I want to. Because I am a person.
Surely we can all agree that neonicotinoid pesticide is going to have to be pulled off the market now science has proved it is killing the bees. But then, Monsanto makes that stuff, too, I’m guessing, and doesn’t a person have the right to sell whatever he (or she) damn well pleases? I mean, Caveat Emptor, right? That’s what Almighty God ( I mean the Almighty invisible Hand, the god who was whispering in Alex Hamilton’s ear, right) promised was Good and Right and True.
Kinda hard to beware in the pitch dark, I grant you, but I’m a person and if I want the lights OFF, well that’s might right too, ain’t it? Who are you to say let there be light? Are YOU a hand? Are YOU invisible?
Hmm. So, by the same token, the consumer has no right to be told (or even to question) whether it’s beef, pork, dog, cat, squirrel, even, or leftovers from Sweeney Todd’s barbers in their pie?
Or, like in the old days, chalk or white lead in the flour or the milk?
On the grounds that if they knew it might put them off?
Bluth, anywhere is beautiful in spring. My favorite season.
Anyway, trust my friend Gunny to start the week off with one of the most depressing articles.
Time for an Occupy Movement Mark 2.
I mean, Caveat Emptor, right?
Sadly, this is the first thing we learned in B-school. Not because that’s the perspective we were supposed to take, but that’s the way the laws were.
I hope Vermont goes for it. And if it’s hinging on the first amendment, i hope the ACLU, or someone, gets involved. I’d be tempted to say go all the way to Scotus, but we know how that will turn out.
Any idea if there’s a list of congresspeople who take donations from Monsanto?
Porn,
This might be a small start…
And there’s always this lovely little fact: (from wikipedia):
Bluth -
dear Christ.
Notable too on that list of political contributions is all of the reps at the state level. And they cover their bases too – D, R, and I.
PS
Lovely question.
The folks over at Open Secrets do their best to keep track of things like that, for all politicians, but we all know that since Citizen’s United it’s now almost impossible to really follow the money. Only direct contributions to the candidate come up on public radar.
Big chunks to individual Dems on that Open Secrets list.
Elena;
You’re welcome.
Meaningless question, unless there’s ever been one who would turn their money down. They pay who they need to pay, and the rest wish they were among the needed. Trying to make a partisan issue out of it is like saying, “Oooo, look, that party gets wet when it rains!”
Monsanto gets bigger because it’s the nature of companies to grow until something stops them. A hundred and four years ago we elected a guy as president who ran on the notion that we really need to make that happen more often than it does, sometimes we really ought to stop that growth somewhere short of where it’s content to stop itself. Go ahead and tell me that we could ever, ever elect a dainty wuss like him again.
Well Natty, it’s who isn’t on the list in the states they’re concentrating on that would be interesting. On Gunny’s list, the R’s have the lions’ share of the bank. But many of the larger ($8000-10000) single payments are to D’s. Just interesting as to why.
btw Gunny, love the picture. But you couldn’t find one of Bachmann chomping on a carrot?
Pornamy,
I suppose we could start digging a little but that’s almost like work, so why not speculate?
If I’m Monsanto, what I’d love to have is a majority of pro-me votes that can pass pro-me legislation whenever I think some up. But what I have to have is an election-proof contingent that can and will defeat any anti-me bills that come up, even if the political balance in Congress just changed dramatically, as happens every few years.
Now when I look at the two parties, what do I see?
The GOP is of course the self-styled party of business, and I’m a business, but I can’t take them for granted just because of that. After all, there are lots and lots of businesses and I want them thinking of me when push comes to shove. So I contribute broadly across the party and trust their famous party discipline to enforce compliance with my interests.
But this does me no good at all if the Democrats suddenly take over while viewing me as an exclusive GOP asset. I need a few of their congressmen and senators in the bag, too, to step up and plead with their leadership to not do this terrible (anti-me) thing to them. And maybe, if need be in extremis, to vote against their party and block whatever liberal threat to agriculture it has dreamt up. And I won’t get that kind of commitment by just being a reliable second tier supporter. I need to represent serious cash they’ve come to depend on.
Secondarily, I also need to be pretty sure that the Democrats I invest in will be around when I need them, so I’ll probably only back sure (or probably) winners.
The biggest corporations are run by people who can pay for the cleverest political advice, so they never focus their “donations” on just one party. Pendulums swing, but the players gotta play at any time, after all.
The global food industry is ruining the health of almost everyone in developed nations. The Mexicans, for example, have gone from thousands of small, local sources for their tortillas to buying almost all of these essential items from one of two companies. And ask yourselves, dear conservative friends on this board, whether those two companies actually compete with each other at all, any more.
Hint: anything less than four major players in a market ceases to operate as a market, and becomes an oligopoly, a multi-headed monopoly.
A good book on how toxic this can become is “The Informant”, by Kurt Eichenwald, the detailed story of the ADM scandal that brought down the DeAndreas empire, and trimmed that corporation’s operations, for a while. Their corporate motto was, I am not making this up, “Our customers are our enemies, our competitors are our friends.”
They were running a pricing cartel on key food ingredients, and were able to do this because for certain key ingredients, the global supply only comes from six or seven companies. And outside the USA, such price-fixing cartels are not even illegal. So they organized most of it in meetings outside the USA.
This problem is far, far bigger than Monsanto, bad as they are.
Kev thou blasphemes against the Holy Hand! His Invisibleness will smite all constraints of trade! In the unregulated wisdom of His infinite palm he will guide all prices to cost plus the merest sliver of profit. And then wipe away the profit in his unseeable grace!
Alternatively, in a really free market, he will blind the eyes of the cops and you will be able to bump off anyone who won’t fix prices until every sector in every business going belongs to one player only.
And the proles, we’ll spend our time watching ‘reality shows’ and ‘sports’ on TV.
Good thing we’re nowhere near any kind of dystopia like that. Better that no major party in this land of the Free would ever think of running a candidate who wanted anything like that to happen.
Bluthner:
well yes indeedy, and let us also be grateful that the enlightened nations, sophisticated folks in Europe and Asia who dress well and appreciate the finer things in life would never dream of interfering with their fine local corporations, by restricting their proper role in fixing prices independent of such boring things as supply and demand.
Only in the USA did anyone ever entertain such barbaric notions as the anti-trust act. (To be fair, the US government only employed the Sherman Act to bust unions, a fit and proper use for the statute, for about twenty years after it was passed. It was only much later that it was ever subverted, to screw with the real patriots in their cosy cartels.)
After all, we cannot have the conditions of the real economy conforming to the assumptions of the economists. Not scientific at all!
I am also sure that the Jellyfish will stand firm when it matters . . . .
From what I have read Kevin I believe that all the conservatives on this forum are against artificially engineered and state tollerated monopolies – and crony capitalism in general.
…oops – “tolerated” – I stuttered on the L
Is that true Gunny?
This from the NYT
Now it may be that legislatures and rule makers aren’t requiring disclosure and that there are powerful vested interests lined up against it but Citizens United doesn’t stop it. In fact it gives it a judicial green light.
Expat:
good news on both fronts.
I think the oncoming tsunami of spending by the Billionaire’s Club for Trickledown will so disgust this nation that a wave of reform will follow. We have been through this before, and the corruption of the Robber Baron era after the Civil War led to a flowering of activist democracy. That pendulum was a bastard.
They will, I think, regret that they ever tried such a naked attempt at smug privilege as the nomination of the Jellyfish, whose considerable personal wealth is invested anywhere except in the USA.
And as this is Tax Day, let me pass on the news that the well-connected gang at GE, formerly led by “factories-on-barges” boy himself, Jack Welch, has enjoyed a negative tax rate of some eighteen percent in recent years. Not only do they not pay any tax on their profits, they actually get IRS refunds, to pay any minor taxes they owe elsewhere.
Sweet deal, is it not?
EP
It’s complicated, but yes, generally it’s now much more difficult to follow the money. Mainly, superpacs are what was in my mind when I wrote that drive-by comment;
I popped onto CiF today for the first time in ages (on the tax poll thread). Has Ng Inc. spawned and multiplied? There’s a new SqlServeItUp and an xflags, hard to tell them all apart.
xflags has been around a while — at least since last fall.
SqlServeItUp is a new one though. I’m thinking Jengis again, maybe; his 3rd grade response to Wacobloke is kinda his style when his meds calibration is borderline.
I was thinking that maybe xflags was that xjetjockey Lefty was tussling with for a while, and was convinced was Ng mk II. Does Sql have something against Squirrel?
Jengis was kind of funny. One conservative i really kind of like on there is Jamestown. But CiFA is so boring nowadays that i have nfc what’s up over there. Just as well, i’m totally smacked with work these days.
My “404″ issue is unresolved with the G. I cannot follow a thread with any consistency. I’m lucky to get a few shots in, before the ’404′ appears and it is just not worth it.
We had a decent thread last week, behind one of Younge’s pieces, mostly because the New NG was not allowed to run free. We all jumped on him, I called him on the obvious changes from the previous guy. (For one thing, our long-term ng was pretty adept at cut/paste and linking stuff from around the Web, this new guy is not competent. Big tell, obvious as hell.)
And without a decent essayist up top, there is far less to say anyway.
I agree that Jengis could be fun, when calm. His explosions were a riot to watch. What I also find to be very strange is the banning of our stoner lawyer from Mass., he was always fun and could do no harm. For a litigator, he has a poor grasp on facts.
SqlServeItUp?
Oh dear.