In Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes wrote, “Love and war are all one … It is lawful to use sleights and stratagems to … attain the wished end.” Simply put, all is fair in love and war. In America, for more than a decade, a war has been waged on the public’s right to know how their food is produced, with Big Ag — biotechnology companies like Monsanto, Dow and DuPont — adhering to de Cervantes’ maxim, pouring millions of dollars into campaigns to prevent mandates that would label foods containing genetically engineered crops.
The war began at the federal level in 2002 when former U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced five bills addressing the need to regulate genetically engineered crops — this included legislation to label consumer goods containing GMOs, as well as safety bills to require testing for things like allergenicity and toxicity of genetically engineered crops. The bills fell to the wayside and none came to a floor vote.
“When I first introduced the bill, Monsanto followed up with a huge ad campaign where men in white coats were working with Petri dishes talking about how they were going to feed the world,” says Dennis Kucinich. “That was fraudulent because the problem with world hunger has nothing to do with genetic engineering. It has everything to do with the misdistribution of resources.”
Now, 12 years later, the war continues with equally epic (and expensive) battles being fought by individual states. This year alone, 26 states have considered a labeling measure of some form or another. Colorado and Oregon are presenting voters with GMO labeling measures on this November’s ballots, Proposition 105 and Measure 92, respectively. Dennis Kucinich and his wife Elizabeth, who is the director of policy for the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, spent time in both states over recent weeks supporting the measures, while Monsanto and other key players in the Big Ag game continue to sink millions of dollars into advertising campaigns (and, in Vermont, litigation) against such state measures.
“[Monsanto has] hopped from argument to argument, from state to state, in whatever way they can to kill the public’s right to know,” Dennis Kucinich says. “This is a simple proposition, which is why any national polls taken have shown consistently over 90 percent of Americans feel they have a right to know whether food is genetically engineered or not. Once you get into legislature or state-by-state campaigning, the distortion that takes place has people spinning and wondering what’s true. The industry is very skillful at putting forth arguments that on their face can’t stand, but when you’re working with millions of dollars and TV ads, how’s the public to know?”
In Colorado, Monsanto has dropped nearly $4.8 million on fighting 105, according to the Colorado Secretary of State’s campaign finance disclosure website. The next top contributor to the “No on 105 Coalition” is PepsiCo, with a contribution of almost $1.7 million. Kraft Foods has contributed just more than $1 million, while Coca-Cola has donated more than $800,000. Larry Cooper, director of Colorado’s Right to Know campaign, says that DuPont just contributed $3 million as of Oct. 23 — a figure that doesn’t show up on the Secretary of State’s website yet. The total, according to the Secretary of State website, comes to $16.7 million in total contributions as of Oct. 27. And that’s just in Colorado. Campaign finance reports from Oregon indicate that Monsanto and other food giants have spent similar amounts against Measure 92.
In contrast, Colorado Right to Know, the coalition that’s been working to get a GMO labeling measure on this November’s statewide ballot since 2012, has raised a little more than $895,000.
“At this point in time we barely have enough money to run a campaign against these giants,” says Cooper. “We’re doing the absolute best we can just to get our message out. Really what we’re doing is talking about the truth about what’s in this language [in Proposition 105]. And we’re having to spend so much time just dispelling the lies that are in their TV ads.”
The TV ads Cooper speaks of are virtually identical for both Oregon and Colorado. The ads consist of farmers discussing how such labeling measures will label some foods incorrectly as containing GMOs while failing to label most foods that actually do contain genetically engineered crops. Cooper says neither of these assertions hold true.
“We’ve done our own research and 75 percent of the food that moms buy in a grocery store will be labeled,” he says. “[Opponents] say [labeling isn’t] going to have any effect — it will have a huge effect. That’s why they are spending so much money to try to eliminate us, because they know that we care about this and they know once things are labeled, people will have to make an informed decision about whether they want to buy genetically engineered foods.”
The ads also claim that labeling will hurt farmers.
“There’s nothing further from the truth,” says Cooper. “Their requirement [in Proposition 105] is that they get a certificate saying that we grew our crops with GM seeds or non-GM seeds. That’s their only obligation. There is nothing else in our language.”
Proponents also claim that labeling will increase costs for consumers, but the men behind ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s have taken to Capitol Hill to lobby for labeling, saying that it won’t increase their costs to add language about GMOs on their products’ labels. Elizabeth Kucinich has lobbied with Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield for labeling measures.
“The idea that labeling will increase prices is absolutely ludicrous. We have labeling in 64 countries around the world,” she says. “Many American manufacturers have to label their products with ‘May Contain GMOs’ because they are selling in these countries. Why are they fighting so hard to keep consumers here in the dark? It’s crazy.”
Elizabeth Kucinich says the two main traits that crops are genetically engineered to exhibit — pesticide producing, where a plant actually produces pesticides, and herbicide resistant, where plants are engineered to withstand heavy herbicide treatments — have lead to pesticides showing up in human blood samples and have pitted farmers against nature in an unwinnable game.
“What we’ve seen and what farmers across the country see after about three or four years, you start to see herbicideresistant weeds developing,” she says. “After a few years, the glyphosate [herbicide, which is found in Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready crops] stops being effective on the weeds. Then you see farmers introducing new chemicals such as atrozine and 2,4-D, which is half of Agent Orange.”
Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency just regulated Dow’s EnlistDuo system, where crops will be grown to be resistant to glyphosate as well as 2,4-D.
“Now we have 2,4-D — how many years is it going to take for weeds to become resistant to 2,4-D and what is the next solution when you have that kind of mindset?” Elizabeth Kucinich asks. “2,4-D being half of Agent Orange … we know what it did to our veterans in Vietnam. We know this is no good, so why on Earth would we be proponents of increasing the chemical treadmill in food production, which needs to be as good and pure as possible when we’re ingesting it, when we’re taking it straight into our bodies?”
However, Elizabeth Kucinich believes that state initiatives to label products containing GMOS are beginning to change the tide.
“This is a growing movement. The more money the industry seems to throw against this, the bigger the movement for labeling as people start to realize what is it they are really trying to hide?” she says. “Because if they weren’t trying to hide, why fight so hard?”
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