GMO Labeling Prop 37: November 6 Is D-Day for the Food Movement

Carson’s book, which cel­e­brated its 50th anniver­sary last month, cat­a­logued the dev­as­tat­ing effects of syn­thetic pes­ti­cides, namely DDT, on nature and bird pop­u­la­tions and launched the mod­ern envi­ron­men­tal move­ment. Her sharp cri­tique of chem­i­cal com­pa­nies and their spread­ing of inten­tional dis­in­for­ma­tion cul­mi­nated in the estab­lish­ment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the ban­ning of DDT and launched the mod­ern envi­ron­men­tal move­ment.

In the inter­ven­ing years, this move­ment of cit­i­zens from all walks of life has grown to include mil­lions of Americans who rec­og­nize the deep con­nec­tion between humans’ inter­ac­tions with the envi­ron­ment, our health and our inher­ent demo­c­ra­tic rights.

Pioneers in the good food rev­o­lu­tion like Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson along with organic and sus­tain­able farm­ers like Fred Kirschenmann and Jim Cochran helped lay a foun­da­tion for a health­ier way to farm and feed the world’s grow­ing pop­u­la­tion in a way that cre­ates a health­ier planet.

The organic and sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture move­ment rose as a direct response to the threats that chem­i­cal agri­cul­ture posed to both human health and the envi­ron­ment. But dur­ing the past 50 years, giant chem­i­cal and agribusi­ness com­pa­nies have con­sol­i­dated con­trol over the food sup­ply, dri­ving more than a mil­lion fam­ily farm­ers off the land and dan­ger­ously con­cen­trat­ing power into a hand­ful of com­pa­nies in every sec­tor of food production.

At the same time, what started as an under­ground rev­o­lu­tion in organic, chemical-free agri­cul­ture has grown into a pow­er­ful eco­nomic force with more than 50 mil­lion reg­u­lar organic con­sumers and more than $31 bil­lion in annual sales.

Giant Chemical Companies Strike Gold with Politically Engineered Loophole

Twenty years ago, even as this new farm move­ment was grow­ing by dou­ble dig­its annu­ally, pes­ti­cide com­pa­nies struck pay dirt when their cor­po­rate lob­by­ists, freshly installed as fed­eral reg­u­la­tors, con­vinced the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that genet­i­cally engi­neered foods were “sub­stan­tially equiv­a­lent” to those that farm­ers had bred and planted for thou­sands of years.

As a result, pro-biotech flacks, and now our gov­ern­ment, par­rot the claim that there’s no mate­r­ial dif­fer­ence between tra­di­tional plant breed­ing and genetic engi­neer­ing, but noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.

In real­ity, genetic engi­neer­ing relies on a rad­i­cal new tech­nol­ogy that invades plant and ani­mal cells with the genetic mate­r­ial of for­eign viruses, bac­te­ria and the DNA of other plants or ani­mals to cre­ate a new trans­genic or genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­ism (GMO) that could never occur in nature.

First Generation of GMO Crops Are Failing in the Fields

Even now, after more than 20 years of per­sis­tent promises, the ag biotech indus­try has only been able to suc­cess­fully com­mer­cial­ize two com­mon traits: her­bi­cide tol­er­ant, like Roundup Ready crops, that are genet­i­cally engi­neered to sur­vive mas­sive doses of her­bi­cides, or insecticide-producing crops that include a genet­i­cally engi­neered poi­son in every cell of the plant to kill pests.

After decades of deny­ing that it was pos­si­ble, the first gen­er­a­tion of biotech crops are rapidly fail­ing in farm­ers’ fields. Almost daily, the main­stream press is report­ing alarm­ing news of the rise of super­weeds, which have been called “the sin­gle largest threat to pro­duc­tion agri­cul­ture that we have ever seen,” and the rise of super­bugs that have grown resis­tant to the genet­i­cally engi­neered Bt toxin designed to kill them.

After an avalanche of empty promises, the evi­dent fail­ure of GMOs to increase yields and the result­ing increase in pes­ti­cide use endan­gers the liveli­hoods of fam­ily farm­ers and con­tin­ues to threaten the safety and sta­bil­ity of our food supply.

Predictably, the biotech industry’s response is to release new GMO crops that are tol­er­ant of even more toxic chem­i­cals, includ­ing 2,4-D corn and soy­beans, which was half of the chem­i­cal makeup of the can­cer pro­duc­ing Agent Orange used to defo­li­ate jun­gles in the Vietnam war.

But the real truth may only now begin­ning to be uncov­ered by inde­pen­dent, non-industry scientists.

In just the past month, French sci­en­tists announced that rats fed Monsanto’s GMO NK603 corn and the flag­ship her­bi­cide Roundup were linked to severe organ dam­age, a dra­matic increase in mam­mary tumors and pre­ma­ture death. These unex­pected results, dis­cov­ered dur­ing the longest, most com­pre­hen­sive peer-reviewed study to ever be con­ducted has shocked con­sumers around the globe, even lead­ing Russia to tem­porar­ily ban the sale and import of Monsanto’s GMO corn.

California, Prop 37 and the Ultimate Battleground for GMO Labeling

Despite the biotech industry’s ram­pant pro­mo­tion of GMO crops, the one thing that most Americans can agree on is that cit­i­zens have a right to know what they’re eat­ing and that GMO foods should be labeled.

The good news is this fall California vot­ers will have a chance to vote on whether or not genet­i­cally engi­neered foods will be labeled in their state. As the 8th largest econ­omy in the world and the lead­ing agri­cul­tural state in the U.S., the impor­tance of Prop 37 for all Americans and the rest of the world can­not be overstated.

California is ground zero in the effort to reclaim our food and our planet from out of con­trol cor­po­ra­tions that want to deny us the right to know what’s in our food.

Already cor­po­rate oppo­nents to “Yes on 37″ have raised more than $34 mil­lion to defeat the grassroots-driven ini­tia­tive. Leading the charge is the world’s largest biotech seed and chem­i­cal giant Monsanto, who has donated more than $7.1 mil­lion, the next high­est donor is DuPont with $4.9 million.

In an irony lost on no one famil­iar with the his­tory of cor­po­rate malfea­sance, the oppo­si­tion side is funded by the same cor­po­ra­tions and run by the lob­by­ists that claimed that cig­a­rettes, Agent Orange and DDT were safe.

Now they want us to trust them on the safety GMOs?

At the moment, the oppo­nents of rea­son­able GMO label­ing efforts are launch­ing an all out media offen­sive across the California air­waves, bom­bard­ing vot­ers with decep­tion, lies and mis­in­for­ma­tion.

Despite the out­right lies that Monsanto and DuPont are telling in their ads, the same junk food com­pa­nies like Coke, Pepsi, Nestle, Kraft and Kellogg’s that are donat­ing tens of mil­lions of dol­lars against “Yes on 37,” already label GMO foods in 50 coun­tries around the world, includ­ing all of Europe, Australia, Japan, Russia and even China.

It’s hard to believe that Pepsi, Kraft and Nestle could label GMO foods in China, but some­how want to deny con­sumers in California that same right! For some rea­son, the same cor­po­ra­tions that espouse the ideals of free mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism believe that Americans shouldn’t have hon­est and trans­par­ent labels on their food.

Prop 37 is a sim­ple, straight­for­ward ini­tia­tive that would require a small label on foods that con­tain genet­i­cally engi­neered ingre­di­ents, includ­ing pro­hibit­ing the use of the word “nat­ural” on food prod­ucts that con­tain such ingre­di­ents. Despite the common-sense nature of this pro­posal, the oppo­si­tion could trot out more than $50 mil­lion for an ad cam­paign in an effort to bury the truth that Americans have a right to know what’s in our food.

The tragic truth of the fight over “Yes on 37″ to label genet­i­cally engi­neered foods is that it picks up exactly where Rachel Carson and the voices of rea­son left off at the launch­ing of the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment. Fifty years ago, when Silent Spring was pub­lished, Monsanto and DuPont were the lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers of DDT, today they’re lead­ing the charge to dis­tort the facts on genetic engi­neer­ing and keep Americans eat­ing in the dark.

No mat­ter what any­one thinks about the ben­e­fits or safety of genet­i­cally engi­neered foods, it’s uncon­scionable that these com­pa­nies that want Americans to trust their prod­ucts are refus­ing to put a sim­ple label on them in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

For the food move­ment, for the future of our planet and our democ­racy, there is no more impor­tant bat­tle than to reclaim our rights from out of con­trol cor­po­ra­tions and the fail­ure of gov­ern­ment oversight.

The rev­o­lu­tion is now. We need every­one at the table. Now is our time!

Dave Murphy

Dave Murphy is the founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of Food Democracy Now!, a grass­roots move­ment of more than 300,000 American farm­ers and cit­i­zens ded­i­cated to reform­ing poli­cies relat­ing to food, agri­cul­ture and the environment.