Bursting the GMO Foods Bubble

All of this activ­ity is designed to cre­ate an illu­sion: that these forces are too big to defeat, and that they are every­where. The lat­ter is at least par­tially true—none of the oppo­si­tion com­pa­nies are based in California. But what really is the intent of this illu­sion? PR attack cam­paigns com­posed of lies actu­ally don’t work in the long run. There are too many blog­gers, too many social media accounts, too many peo­ple who will imme­di­ately rec­og­nize the lies and say something.

No, this oppo­si­tion campaign’s real tar­get is the Yes on 37 cam­paign­ers them­selves. It is designed to gen­er­ate a feel­ing of defeatism stem­ming from seem­ingly unlim­ited funds in the hands of the opposition.

In truth, a cam­paign is all about num­bers. The No on 37 cam­paign hopes we’ll mis­take one type of num­ber for another—misinterpreting money num­bers for peo­ple num­bers. The Yes on 37 cam­paign has a great many real, breath­ing peo­ple. The oppo­si­tion doesn’t and is sub­sti­tut­ing money for people.

Dollars don’t vote. People do. The true smoke-and-mirrors aspect of the oppo­si­tion cam­paign is that it is try­ing to make it look like there is a real oppo­si­tion move­ment. There isn’t. What is there in fact is a bunch of paid PR oper­a­tors push­ing out press releases, putting up bad videos with eas­ily dis­be­lieved talk­ing heads, buy­ing news­pa­per endorse­ments, and the like. An inter­est­ing exer­cise in fact check­ing is to look at the video stats on YouTube. Opposition videos are there but with very few views. The recent Danny DeVito and com­pany video has got­ten over 100,000 views in just a few days.

Since the Yes on 37 cam­paign began with a LOT of people—a mil­lion sig­na­tures on the peti­tion to launch the initiative—and has grown since then, there exist an enor­mous num­ber of voices that should be able to eas­ily drown out the paid lies of the few in the opposition.

Part of accom­plish­ing this is under­stand­ing the men­tal­ity of the oppo­si­tion. That men­tal­ity can be summed up in two words: abject fear. The folks at Monsanto and their biotech brethren are a lot of things, but they are not stu­pid. The fab­ric of lies that forms the foun­da­tion of their GMO mar­ket is com­ing undone. And this undo­ing is at the hands of the very nature they tried to arro­gantly master.

The bugs and weeds their prod­ucts are designed to com­bat are becom­ing immune and in spec­tac­u­lar ways. Glyphosate-resistant pig­weed is report­edly grow­ing in fields at a rate of three inches per day, dam­ag­ing and destroy­ing farm equip­ment. The promise that GMOs would reduce pes­ti­cide use has now come undone, requir­ing more and more appli­ca­tions of poisons. 

The biotech industry’s basic inter­est in GMOs is not rooted in grow­ing food and feed­ing the world. It has every­thing to do with patents. Patents open the door to exclu­siv­ity of prod­uct and even monop­oly. The aver­age prices of Monsanto’s seeds have increased 135 per­cent since 2001, accord­ing to the New York Times. And since Monsanto’s con­tracts for­bid farm­ers from sav­ing seeds, new batches must be pur­chased for every planting.

This use of lies and cap­tive mar­kets can only go so far before it col­lapses like the toxic bub­ble that it is.

And California’s GMO Labeling Proposition 37 is the nee­dle poised over this bub­ble. We as the pro­po­nents of this bill need to under­stand this and not flinch in the face of appar­ent oppo­si­tion. Once label­ing is accom­plished in California, the rest of the US will tend to fol­low. Washington State already has a sim­i­lar ini­tia­tive process run­ning. Then the mar­ket dynamic of GMOs will begin to shift as we, the consumers—the real mar­ket force—flex our col­lec­tive muscle.

How do we make this hap­pen in the short term? We communicate—not just with each other but with the unde­cided and unin­formed. Increase the use of social media and the web. It costs but a lit­tle of our time. Support the cam­paign with dol­lars as well. This way we can get more of our mes­sages into mass media too. It never hurts to push out more true messages.

One thing I find effec­tive is sim­ply ask­ing peo­ple I know how they will vote on Prop 37. People either say, “I’m vot­ing yes,” or “What’s GMO?” And that’s an easy ques­tion to answer, which leads to another com­mit­ment to vote yes.

Click here to visit the cam­paign site. And if you’re in California, vote early and help turn the opposition’s fear into their own case of apathy.

This arti­cle was not paid for by the Yes on Proposition 37 Campaign.