GMOs—People Pushing Back

“Compared to, say, five years ago, there is much more aware­ness about GMOs in the US,” Roseboro told Organic Connections.“For exam­ple, there are more ini­tia­tives to get manda­tory label­ing of genet­i­cally engi­neered foods going on now than at any time in the almost 13 years that I’ve been cov­er­ing this topic. We have a bal­lot ini­tia­tive hap­pen­ing in California to get a label­ing law passed in the elec­tion this year. We have a peti­tion that has been sub­mit­ted to the FDA chal­leng­ing the agency to change their out­dated pol­icy on genet­i­cally engineeredfoods—and this peti­tion has been sup­ported by nearly a mil­lion pub­lic com­ments, the most com­ments the FDA has ever received on any issue.

“There was also a ‘Dear Colleague’ let­ter that was recently signed by 55 mem­bers of Congresstelling the FDA to label genet­i­cally engi­neered foods.

“Along with this, ‘non-GMO’ is the fastest grow­ing nat­ural food cat­e­gory right now. Sales of Non-GMO Project–verified prod­ucts are over a bil­lion dol­lars, and grow­ing at some­thing like 24 per­cent per year.

“All of these are indi­ca­tions that more and more peo­ple are becom­ing aware of this issue, demand­ing the right to know and want­ing non-GMO prod­ucts. They want to avoid GMOs because of the risks to human health and the environment.”

Probably the key bat­tle to be won against GMOs is that of clearly label­ing them so they can be avoided or not, by choice. Democrats and Republicans, lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives, and any other set of oppos­ing fac­tions can cer­tainly agree that the pub­lic has a right to know if their food is genet­i­cally mod­i­fied or not. And the demand for label­ing is now reach­ing a fever pitch.

“On a state level, there are about 18 dif­fer­ent states that have intro­duced bills to label genet­i­cally engi­neered foods,” Roseboro reported. “A bill was recently intro­duced in Washington State by two state representatives—one a Democrat and one a Republican—and it has the sup­port of wheat farm­ers in east­ern Washington. These farm­ers grow wheat that is exported to Asia, where there is manda­tory label­ing of GMOs. There is talk of intro­duc­ing GM wheat to their region, which would basi­cally destroy their export markets.

“At the same time there is a lot of inter­est in organic foods in the Seattle area, so this label­ing bill has the sup­port of those peo­ple as well. The sup­port­ers of this bill are going to rein­tro­duce it in the fall and there will be a lot of lob­by­ing. They had a rally at the state house in sup­port of the bill, and the law­mak­ers were just blown away by how many peo­ple were sup­port­ing this measure.”

“There are a cou­ple of other bills that are cur­rently going through leg­is­la­tures. There is one in Connecticut and one also in Vermont; evi­dently the one in Connecticut has plenty of sup­port from both Democrats and Republicans. There is another bill that has been intro­duced in Hawaii as well.

“Some of these bills have been stalled because of intense lob­by­ing from agribusi­ness and the biotech­nol­ogy indus­try; they see them as a huge threat to their busi­ness. In fact, when manda­tory label­ing was intro­duced in Europe, the food man­u­fac­tur­ers would not buy genet­i­cally engi­neered ingre­di­ents because they did not want to put GMO labels on their prod­ucts. Essentially it killed the mar­ket for GMOs in Europe. The biotech­nol­ogy indus­try is con­cerned that would hap­pen here as well—and it very likely could.”

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Roseboro’s pub­li­ca­tions are cer­tainly assist­ing in this push by mak­ing con­sumers, pro­duc­ers and farm­ers aware of GMOs and their ramifications.

“Most Americans remain unaware of genet­i­cally engi­neered foods and the fact that they’re very wide­spread in the food sup­ply,” Roseboro con­tin­ued. “More than 70 per­cent of the processed food in the super­mar­kets con­tains ingre­di­ents from genet­i­cally engi­neered corn, soy, cot­ton, canola or sugar beets. It’s often the case that once peo­ple start to learn more about this topic, they want to avoid GMOs. So we’re edu­cat­ing con­sumers and also the indus­try: farm­ers, grain sup­pli­ers, seed com­pa­nies and food manufacturers.

“We also pub­lish a direc­tory of sup­pli­ers of non-GMO prod­ucts, called the Non-GMO Sourcebook. It is a direc­tory of sup­pli­ers of non-GMO seeds, grains, ingre­di­ents in food prod­ucts, and also ani­mal feed. We’ve put all the var­i­ous com­pa­nies that are sell­ing and pro­duc­ing non-GMO prod­ucts into one place, so that when a farmer or even a home gar­dener wants to buy non-GMO seeds, or a food man­u­fac­turer is look­ing for non-GMO ingre­di­ents, or con­sumers are look­ing for non-GMO food prod­ucts, they can find them.”

Because of the enor­mous lob­by­ing power of the biotech indus­try, and because the major media has seen fit to com­pletely avoid the issue of GMOs, it truly is up to the peo­ple. But now the peo­ple are grow­ing rapidly in num­ber and clam­or­ing to be heard.

“I believe the broad pub­lic will be brought on board through con­tin­ued edu­ca­tion about this risky tech­nol­ogy that’s being foisted upon us, and the raised aware­ness that they should have a right to know whether their foods are genet­i­cally engi­neered or not.” Roseboro con­cluded. “I think that any con­sumer can relate to that basic right.

“There is also now a trend toward increased trans­parency. People more and more want to know the ori­gins of their food, and in some cases which farmer is pro­duc­ing it. Having the right to know whether our foods are genet­i­cally engi­neered or not goes right along with that trend.

“When sur­veys are done of just reg­u­lar con­sumers about whether such foods should be labeled, there’s always an over­whelm­ing majority—80 to 90 percent—who say yes. That is some­thing that every­body can agree on. Now we just have to get the FDA to do it.”

For more infor­ma­tion on The Organic & Non-GMO Report, and to sub­scribe, please visit www.non-gmoreport.com.

To learn more about The Non-GMO Sourcebook, go to www.nongmosourcebook.com.