2014
is shaping up to be a decisive year for the future of food and farming.
Grassroots activists are gearing up for new legislative battles, including
state GMO labeling laws and county bans on growing genetically engineered
crops. Meanwhile the multinational food corporations last month raised the
stakes in the ongoing David vs. Goliath battle by petitioning the
U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to allow companies to continue to
label or market products that contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as
"natural." And all signs point to efforts by industry and the FDA to
float either voluntary, or watered-down mandatory GMO labeling laws that would
take away states’ rights to impose strict GMO labeling laws, and also exempt a
large percentage of GMO ingredients from labeling.
For more than two decades, Monsanto and Big Food have poisoned and profited
with impunity, thanks to the FDA’s reckless1992 dictate that
pesticide-drenched (Roundup-resistant) or insecticide-impregnated (Bt-spliced)
crops and foods are “safe and substantially equivalent” to non-GE foods. Now,
the Biotech Bullies and Junk Food Giants are under siege by a well-informed and
passionate grassroots food movement that is determined to drastically reduce or
eliminate the market share of genetically engineered and chemically-intensive
foods and crops.
Since natural health and food activists discovered the “Achilles Heel” of the
GMA and processed junk food industries—mandatory labeling—there has been no
stopping this movement. Over the past several years, this movement has
painstakingly built a broad national coalition to demand laws requiring
mandatory labeling of foods containing genetically engineered ingredients, the
same types of laws that have been passed in the European Union and scores of
other nations. Food activists, bolstered by a growing number of successful
class action lawsuits, are also demanding that food manufacturers and retailers
put an end to the routine industry practice of fraudulently labeling or
marketing products contaminated with GMOs and other chemicals as “natural” or
“all natural.”
In the past two years, citizen activists in 30 states have pressured
legislators to pass mandatory GMO labeling laws, with partial success in three
states: Vermont, Connecticut
and Maine.
Anti-GMO campaigners boldly challenged the mega-billion-dollar biotech and Big
Food establishment in 2012 in California
(Proposition 37) and 2013 in Washington
State (I-522) by
launching state GMO labeling initiatives. Pro-organic and natural health
activists raised a multi-million dollar war chest and mobilized millions of
voters in two hard-fought and highly publicized campaigns that industry barely
won (51%-49%). Both initiatives garnered national attention. Combined,
they forced the biotech and food elite to spend $70 million ($12 million of
which was illegally laundered in
Washington state through their front group, the Grocery Manufacturers
Association) and wage a blatantly dishonest campaign that ultimately divided
the industry and damaged the reputations and
sales of a number of national brands, including Coca-Cola (Honest Tea and
Odwalla); Pepsico (Naked Juice); General Mills (Cascadian Farm and Muir Glen);
Unilever (Ben & Jerry’s); Dean Foods (Horizon, Silk, White Wave); Heinz
(Heinz Organic), Nestle’s, and Kellogg’s (Kashi, Morningstar Farms,
Gardenburger).
Meanwhile, inspired in part by this anti-GMO grassroots upsurge, over 100 class action lawsuits have
been filed across the U.S., charging major food corporations with labeling
fraud for labeling or marketing GMO-tainted or chemically processed foods and
cooking oils as “natural” or “all natural.” Rather than admit that much
of their product lines are junk foods filled with synthetic chemicals and GMOs,
and that nearly the entire $70-billion “natural” products industry is based on
fraud and deception (i.e. misleading health minded consumers into believing
that unregulated, non-certified “natural” products are “nearly organic,”),
large companies such as Pepsi, General Mills, Kellogg’s and Con-Agra, and
specialty brands such as Chabani and Barbara’s will likely pay out millions of
dollars in out-of-court settlements this year while quietly removing “natural”
and “all natural” labels from their non-organic products.
GMO labeling laws are the cornerstone of the anti-GMO movement. But consumers
are also expanding the fight by demanding outright bans on the growing of GMO
crops. A number of counties in California, Washington and Hawaii
have already passed bans, while a half dozen others, including counties in Oregon and California,
will vote to create GMO-free zones in 2014.
Beyond “Exemptions:” Comprehensive
Labeling
In a bizarre but effective propaganda move, polls reveal that Monsanto and the
Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) bamboozled millions of voters into
voting “no” on mandatory GMO food labeling initiatives in California
and Washington
by pretending to take the side of consumers. How? By pointing out that these
ballot initiatives failed to require GMO labels on restaurant, cafeteria and
take-out food, and on meat and animal products. During the California
and Washington
campaigns, industry hammered home its message that the proposed initiatives
were “incomplete,” “confusing,” “expensive” and riddled with “loopholes” that
somehow benefitted nefarious “special interests.” In fact, consumers would have
preferred a more comprehensive law, with no exemptions. But state laws mandate
single-subject or limited provision language, and federal law preempts
mandatory state labels on meat packages (though not on grocery store shelves,
or on meat and dairy cases).
In the wake of Monsanto and the GMA successfully sowing confusion over GMO
labeling “exemptions,” a growing number of activists have decided to call
industry’s bluff by upping the ante. Future plans include pushing not only for
GMO food labeling laws, but for all-inclusive food labeling legislation that
will require restaurants, schools and grocery stores to label not just foods
that contain GMO ingredients, but also foods from factory farms where animals
are fed GMO-contaminated feed.
As Alexis Baden-Meyer, Political Director of the Organic Consumers Association
puts it:
“Tens of
millions of Americans want to know if the food they buy contains genetically
engineered ingredients. They want to know whether the meat, fish and animal
products they consume come from animals reared on factory farms or CAFO’s
(Confined Animal Feeding Operations), where the animals are inhumanely
confined, routinely fed genetically engineered grain, injected with synthetic
hormones, engorged with growth promoters and dosed with antibiotics. Concerned
consumers want and need this information whether they are shopping in a grocery
store, sitting down in a restaurant or worrying about what their kids are
eating in the school cafeteria. After we win the upcoming strategic battles
over GMO food labeling in Vermont and Oregon, organic
consumers and our allies will push for comprehensive factory farm labels as
well.”
Industry’s Next Move: Co-Opting the
Right-to-Know Movement
Industry sees the writing on the wall. As the head of the GMA admitted last
year “we can’t keep fighting these labeling battles in every state.” Monsanto,
Bayer and their allies such as General Mills, Coca-Cola and Pepsi know that in
2014, several states including Vermont and Oregon will likely pass mandatory
GMO food labeling laws, while a flood of successful class action lawsuits will
highlight the fact that major brands are fraudulently labeling their GMO and
chemically-tainted junk foods and beverages as “natural” or all natural.
Once a greater degree of labeling transparency is required by law, even if in
just a handful of states, leading food manufacturers will find themselves in a
terrible bind. Will Kellogg’s or Coke admit that their products contain GMOs in
Vermont or Oregon,
while refusing to divulge this fact in the other 48 states, Canada and Mexico?
Or will they be forced to do what they’ve already done in the EU, take these
GMOs out of their products? Similarly if they can’t label their junk foods as
“natural” or “all natural,” how will they successfully compete in the
marketplace?
Backed into a corner by the anti-GMO movement, industry has come out fighting.
The GMA has called on the
Obama Administration and the FDA to bail out Big Food. If grassroots-powered
state laws and class action judges will no longer permit the biotech and food
industry to secretly tamper with non-organic food and then fraudulently label
these products as “natural,” then industry wants the federal government to take
away states’ power to require GMO labeling, and at the same time, take away the
judiciary’s power to rule on fraudulently labeled “natural” products.
Leaked documents obtained by
the New York Times reveal that the GMA is lobbying
the FDA to allow the use of “natural” on food labels even if the products
contain GMOs. As Times writer Stephanie Strom reported on Dec. 19:
“Use of the
term "natural" is now generating battles similar to previous fights
over terms like organic, amid initiatives in several states that seek to label
foods in a more transparent way. Last summer, Connecticut passed legislation on labeling
that would make it illegal to use the word "natural" on the packaging
of any food product containing biotech ingredients, and the governor signed it
on Dec. 11.”
At the same time former USDA officials Dan Glickman and Kathleen Merrigan are
floating the idea that certain members of the organic elite might be persuaded
to back off on the demand for strict GMO labeling if certified organic products
are allowed to state on their labels that they are “GMO-free.” As Glickman and
Merrigan told the LA Times:
“Mandatory
GMO labeling of all food will continue to arouse passions on both sides of the
issue. Though it may not satisfy all GMO-labeling advocates nor be welcomed by
all leaders in the biotechnology industry, allowing a GMO-free organic label
provides more choice in the marketplace and responds to the demands of millions
of American consumers in a practical and common sense way.”
Meanwhile informed sources in the organic industry are warning that the FDA
might be preparing to propose a watered-down federal GMO labeling law designed
to co-opt the organic and anti-GMO Movement and take away states’ rights to
pass stricter labeling laws covering all genetically engineered ingredients
basically nullifying laws now under consideration in Vermont, Oregon and
several dozen other states.
This strategy would involve the FDA allowing foods made from highly processed
GE ingredients, such as cooking oils, high fructose corn syrup and sugar beets,
that contain no easily detectable GE proteins down to a specified level to be
labeled "natural”; and certified organic foods to be labeled as “GMO-free.”
Under this strategy, labels would be required on only those foods that contain
readily detectable GMO proteins, as determined by standardized tests. In other
words a large percentage of GMO-tainted foods would still not have to be
labeled.
So as we near victory on the GMO labeling front in Vermont
and Oregon,
and in class-action lawsuits this year, we must beware FDA treachery and the
willingness of some in the organic and so-called “natural” industry to sell us
out. If the FDA proposes a watered-down federal GMO labeling bill, or a
rubber-stamp for the fraudulent industry practice of labeling GMO-tainted foods
as “natural” or “all natural,” we must raise holy hell, and mobilize as never
before.
Either way 2014 is shaping up to be a make or break year for citizen activism
on the food and farming front, part of a larger battle that will determine
whether we, the grassroots majority, take back our democracy, or surrender to
the corporatocracy and their indentured media, scientists and politicians.
