Dubious Claims versus Facts about Prop 37

21 Sep, 2012

Guest Post by Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit

Dubious claims vs Facts about Prop 37Last week I wrote about how the No on 37 campaign—the California bal­lot ini­tia­tive that would require label­ing of GMOs foods—is rely­ing on experts with ques­tion­able cre­den­tials to do its bid­ding. Over the past few weeks, two expert reports have emerged from the No cam­paign that also war­rant closer scrutiny.

The first, enti­tled “California’s Proposition 37: Effects of Mandatory Labeling of GM Food,” was co-authored by University of California at Davis pro­fes­sor Colin Carter and pub­lished in the newslet­ter of the University of California Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics. It’s not clear if the report was funded by the No cam­paign since the arti­cle doesn’t say one way or the other.

Regardless of the finan­cial sup­port, the arti­cle con­tains at least one glar­ing error that’s big enough to call into ques­tion the entire piece, along with the authors’ cred­i­bil­ity. And right in the first para­graph: “The California ini­tia­tive would imple­ment a zero-tolerance pol­icy for acci­den­tal pres­ence of small amounts of GM sub­stances.” In fact, Prop 37 specif­i­cally focuses on the delib­er­ate use of GMO ingre­di­ents and exempts acci­den­tal occur­rences. (This can hap­pen due to drift­ing of GMO seeds to organic or non-GMO crops.)

To be clear, Prop 37 does not require labels on foods that were unin­ten­tion­ally and/or unknow­ingly con­t­a­m­i­nated by genet­i­cally engi­neered seed or food. If you don’t believe me, read the lan­guage yourself.

Much of the arti­cle is based on this erro­neous asser­tion. For exam­ple, the authors com­plain about how farm­ers could not adhere to this stan­dard; that the stan­dard is higher than that of other nations, and even higher than the U.S. organic stan­dard. But none of this is true, which makes read­ing the entire arti­cle very confusing.

Parke Wilde, a pro­fes­sor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, recently blogged about Carter’s error and how the Oakland Tribune picked up on it, fur­ther­ing the con­fu­sion about what ini­tia­tive requires.

In his post enti­tled, “Incorrect reports say that California’s Prop 37 has zero tol­er­ance for acci­den­tal GMO con­tent,” Wilde says that even when he emailed Carter about the mat­ter, he “didn’t really back up this claim that the ini­tia­tive takes a zero-tolerance posi­tion on acci­den­tal con­t­a­m­i­na­tion.” So a University of California pro­fes­sor gets the basic facts wrong and then when asked about it by a col­league, evades the ques­tion. Not exactly a trust­wor­thy source.

The arti­cle goes on to make other exag­ger­ated con­clu­sions such as “cer­ti­fied non-GM processed food prod­ucts will vir­tu­ally dis­ap­pear from food stores” but with­out any actual analy­sis or sci­en­tific basis for such a dra­matic claim. The arti­cle con­tains no cita­tions; pre­sum­ably this is the for­mat of the pub­li­ca­tion, but it makes under­stand­ing the basis for the authors’ con­clu­sions almost impossible.

A sec­ond arti­cle also from University of California at Davis pro­fes­sors makes sim­i­larly unsub­stan­ti­ated claims about how non-GMO foods would just dis­ap­pear from the mar­ket, along with wild pre­dic­tions about increased food costs.

That arti­cle, enti­tled, “Proposition 37—California Food Labeling Initiative: Economic Implications for Farmers and the Food Industry if the Proposed Initiative were Adopted,” is co-authored by UC Davis pro­fes­sors Julian Alston and Daniel Sumner. According to the report, “The work for this project was under­taken with par­tial fund­ing sup­port from No on 37.” The Los Angeles Times reported that the No cam­paign paid the authors “at least $30,000.”

Alston has pre­vi­ous ties to Monsanto, accord­ing to this Sacramento Bee arti­cle from 2004, which explains the relationship:

In July 2002, UC Davis farm eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor Julian Alston found a patron in the pri­vate sec­tor: Monsanto, one of the world’s five largest crop biotech­nol­ogy firms. The offi­cial announce­ment came in the form of a let­ter. “Dear Dr. Alston,” it read. “Please find enclosed a check for $40,000 that rep­re­sents an unre­stricted gift in sup­port of your research program.”

That same in-depth story (well worth the long read) paints UC Davis as a research incu­ba­tor for Big Biotech: “You name it, and biotech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies help pay for it at UC Davis: lab­o­ra­tory stud­ies, schol­ar­ships, post-doctoral stu­dents’ salaries, pro­fes­sors’ travel expenses, even the cam­pus util­ity bill.”

The No on 37 cam­paign released the recent report with this dra­matic head­line: “UC Davis Professors of Agricultural Economics Release New Report that Shows Proposition 37 Will Increase Costs for California Farmers and Food Processors by $1.2 Billion.” The report makes a num­ber of other claims, mostly based on ques­tion­able assump­tions. As for the $1.2 bil­lion in increased food costs, the fig­ure assumes food mak­ers would sub­sti­tute non-GMO ingre­di­ents, which the authors base upon what hap­pened in Europe upon manda­tory label­ing. However, there is no evi­dence to sug­gest the food indus­try will respond the same way here. The European Union has a much longer his­tory of oppos­ing GMOs then we do in the U.S. so it’s really not a fair com­par­i­son. At the very least, we just don’t know. Proposition 37 only requires label­ing, not reformulation.

Once again, most of the authors’ addi­tional con­clu­sions are based on this one faulty assump­tion. For exam­ple, they claim that pas­sage of Prop 37 and the ensu­ing “com­plete switch to GE vari­eties” would cause harm to farm­ers and the envi­ron­ment, result in high com­pli­ance costs for indus­try, as well as place California agri­cul­ture at a com­pet­i­tive dis­ad­van­tage. But these are just the authors’ spec­u­la­tive opin­ions, based on faulty assumptions.

Moreover, this report is not pub­lished in a peer-reviewed pub­li­ca­tion; in fact, it’s not pub­lished any­where, except on the No on 37 web­site. And while the No cam­paign made sure we knew the two authors are UC Davis pro­fes­sors (it’s men­tioned sev­eral times on this page) appar­ently the authors needed to include this dis­claimer next to their bios: “Titles are for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion only. The report is the authors’ inde­pen­dent work and not a prod­uct of the University of California.”

So both the authors and the No on 37 cam­paign gets to have it both ways. They can claim the University of California affil­i­a­tion with­out mak­ing their work a prod­uct of UC. Whatever the affil­i­a­tion or fund­ing source, both of these reports should be dis­missed as merely the unsub­stan­ti­ated opin­ions of a few aca­d­e­mics, as opposed to reli­able sci­en­tific analy­sis backed up by peer review.

Michele is a pub­lic health lawyer who has been research­ing and writ­ing about the food indus­try and food pol­i­tics since 1996. Visit her site at www.EatDrinkPolitics.com/

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