Food Lobby Makes Defeating GMO Labeling in California Its “Highest Priority”

You may not know the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association, but its mem­bers rep­re­sent the nation’s largest food makers—those with the most at stake in the bat­tle over GMO label­ing; for exam­ple, soft drink and snack giant PepsiCo, cereal mak­ers Kellogg and General Mills, and of course, biotech behe­moth Monsanto. 

According to state fil­ing reports, so far GMA has spent $375,000 on its efforts to oppose the label­ing mea­sure, with its mem­bers adding addi­tional out-of-state lob­by­ing power in the tens of thou­sands of dollars.

Never mind polling demon­strat­ing that a whop­ping 90 per­cent of Californians think they deserve the right to know what they are eat­ing. GMA also won’t bother to men­tion the more than 40 other nations (includ­ing the European Union, Brazil, and China) that already require food mak­ers to dis­close GMOs.

Big Food Lobbying to Undermine Health

This is hardly the first time the nation’s most pow­er­ful trade asso­ci­a­tion of food man­u­fac­tur­ers has mar­shaled its resources to oppose com­mon sense food and nutri­tion policy—at both the national and state levels. 

As I doc­u­mented in my book, Appetite for Profit, for years GMA flexed its lob­by­ing mus­cle in state leg­is­la­tures all over the coun­try fight­ing bills that were sim­ply try­ing to remove junk food and soda from school vend­ing machines.

Big Food lob­by­ists have also banded together to vocif­er­ously fight any attempt to restrict out of con­trol junk food mar­ket­ing to chil­dren on TV and other media.

For exam­ple, in 2005, GMA was a found­ing mem­ber of the Alliance for American Advertising, whose stated pur­pose was to defend the food industry’s alleged First Amendment right to adver­tise to chil­dren and to pro­mote vol­un­tary self-regulation as an alter­na­tive to gov­ern­ment action.

More recently, the Grocery Manufacturers Association was among lead­ing trade groups and cor­po­ra­tions oppos­ing the fed­eral government’s attempt to improve industry’s own vol­un­tary guide­lines for food mar­ket­ing to chil­dren. As this Reuters spe­cial report from April explains, GMA’s chief lob­by­ist vis­ited the White House last July along with sev­eral top food indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives (includ­ing from Nestle, Kellogg, and General Mills) to scut­tle an effort by four fed­eral agen­cies that would have pro­tected chil­dren from preda­tory junk food marketing.

But Food Makers Love Labels Don’t They?

It seems rather ironic that the same food mak­ers tak­ing advan­tage of every inch of food pack­ag­ing space to con­vince shop­pers to pur­chase its prod­ucts would object so strongly to label­ing for some­thing they claim is not harmful.

Indeed in recent years, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, in rec­og­niz­ing that food com­pa­nies’ so-called “front of pack­age” label­ing is so out of con­trol that it com­mis­sioned not one but two Institute of Medicine reports to make rec­om­men­da­tions to fix the prob­lem and un-confuse consumers.

Unwilling to tol­er­ate gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion designed to help Americans, the Grocery Manufacturers Association has been aggres­sively pro­mot­ing its own new nutri­tion label­ing scheme it calls “Facts Up Front.” But as Food Politics author Marion Nestle has explained, this is an obvi­ous end-run around the feds. Here is how the food indus­try describes its own vol­un­tary program:

Facts Up Front is a nutrient-based label­ing sys­tem that sum­ma­rizes impor­tant infor­ma­tion from the Nutrition Facts Panel in a sim­ple and easy-to-use for­mat on the front of food and bev­er­age packages.

Translation: We are repeat­ing infor­ma­tion already required on the back of the pack­age, now plac­ing it in a for­mat we like bet­ter on the front.

See how that works? The food indus­try is always in charge. That’s why the nation’s largest pack­aged food lobby and its mem­bers are shak­ing in its boots over 90 per­cent of Californians want­ing to see GMO label­ing on food.

And no won­der, because as GMA President Bailey cor­rectly warned her audi­ence: “If California wins, you need to be wor­ried the cam­paign will come to your state.”

Very wor­ried.

Michele Simon

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/