From Mommy Bloggers to Clandestine Spies, Here's How Monsanto's PR Company Controls the GMO Debate

[villager]

<snip>

As the debate over GMOs wages on, the forces pushing for increased use of GMOs continue to spend an incredible amount of money on a marketing blitz to recruit more voices sympathetic to their cause. And if some of the tactics employed by the agrichemical industry seem like something out the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce advertising agency, well, that’s because they are.

In an article for the Huffington Post, Carey Gillam, a former business reporter for Reuters who later began working for U.S. Right to Know (a nonprofit largely funded by the Organic Consumers Association), describes the pressure she felt from Monsanto and other Big Ag companies to jump on the GMO train:

Pressure from Monsanto began when I first started covering them around 1999 or 2000, and it wasn’t even GMO crops. At the time Monsanto was in transition from an industrial chemical company involved in litigation with PCBs to an agrichemical and biotech seed company. They had some GMO crops but they had only been out a few years. They also had the pesticide glyphosate or Roundup, and they were marketing bovine growth hormone for dairy cows. There were a lot of questions about a lot of this stuff.

While logical people can debate the positives and negatives of GMOs, the company behind many of Big Ag’s pro-GMO ads raises serious questions about the campaign’s credibility.

One of the largest purveyors of pro-GMO literature is the Council for Biotechnology Information, a front group funded by the Big 6 pesticide and GMO corporations: Monsanto, BASF, Bayer, Dow, Dupont and Sygenta. The council hired the PR form Ketchum (which formerly worked on Brown & Williamson’s cigarette campaigns) to create the website GMOAnswers.com, a pro-GMO website that claims to “answer your questions about GMOs” using “independent experts.” As Reuters notes, the council is “committed to spending millions more annually for several more years on this campaign.”

But one of those experts, Kevin Folta, came under intense scrutiny for his pro-GMO literature after a Freedom of Information Act request filed by U.S. Right to Know unearthed a longstanding financial relationship with Ketchum and Monsanto. Folta used the PR company’s literature—verbatim—in his responses on GMOAnswers. As Buzzfeed reports, he also worked with Ketchum to write an op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel and received a $25,000 grant directly from Monsanto to use how he saw fit.

<snip>

http://www.alternet.org/food/mommy-bloggers-clandestine-spies-heres-how-monsantos-pr-company-controls-gmo-debate

[frazzled]

1. I just can't decide

Who should I believe?

109 Nobel laureates--"all but 10 of whom earned their prizes in the fields of physics, chemistry or medicine"--who confirm that GMOs have consistently found to be safe?

Or a conspiracy theory on alternet?

Sometimes it's so hard to know whom to believe

[villager]

2. Happy Glysophating to ya!

[yurbud]

14. Even if putting animal genes in vegetables weren't directly harmful, making it "Round Up ready"

Implies that it's going to be doused with a ton of Round UP aka glysophate.

I'd like to see those scientists who say it's safe drink a milkshake of that shit.

[villager]

16. That's the "inconvenient" part that the self-ascribed "experts," "skeptics," et al...

...all too conveniently ignore...

[kristopher]

3. How did they "confirm that GMOs...(are) safe"?

The National Academies haven't.

Authors
Committee on Genetically Engineered Crops: Past Experience and Future Prospects; Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources; Division on Earth and Life Studies; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine


Description

Genetically engineered (GE) crops were first introduced commercially in the 1990s. After two decades of production, some groups and individuals remain critical of the technology based on their concerns about possible adverse effects on human health, the environment, and ethical considerations. At the same time, others are concerned that the technology is not reaching its potential to improve human health and the environment because of stringent regulations and reduced public funding to develop products offering more benefits to society. While the debate about these and other questions related to the genetic engineering techniques of the first 20 years goes on, emerging genetic-engineering technologies are adding new complexities to the conversation.

Genetically Engineered Crops builds on previous related Academies reports published between 1987 and 2010 by undertaking a retrospective examination of the purported positive and adverse effects of GE crops and to anticipate what emerging genetic-engineering technologies hold for the future. This report indicates where there are uncertainties about the economic, agronomic, health, safety, or other impacts of GE crops and food, and makes recommendations to fill gaps in safety assessments, increase regulatory clarity, and improve innovations in and access to GE technology.

Download report here (sign in as guest)
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/23395/genetically-engineered-crops-experiences-and-prospects

Twenty Years of Failure
Why GM crops have failed to deliver on their promises
Publication - 5 November, 2015
Twenty years ago, the first genetically modified (GM) crops were planted in the USA, alongside dazzling promises about this new technology. Two decades on, the promises are getting bigger and bigger, but GM crops are not delivering any of them. Not only was this technology supposed to make food and agriculture systems simpler, safer and more efficient, but GM crops are increasingly being touted as the key to 'feeding the world' and 'fighting climate change'.
The promises may be growing, but the popularity of GM crops is not. Despite twenty years of pro-GM marketing by powerful industry lobbies, GM technology has only been taken up by a handful of countries, for a handful of crops. GM crops are grown on only 3% of global agricultural land. Figures from the GM industry in fact show that only five countries account for 90% of global GM cropland, and nearly 100% of these GM crops are one of two kinds: herbicide-tolerant or pesticide-producing. Meanwhile, whole regions of the world have resisted GM crops. European consumers do not consume GM foods, and a single type of GM maize is cultivated in Europe. Most of Asia is GM-free, with the GM acreage in India and China mostly accounted for by a non-food crop: cotton. Only three countries in Africa grow any GM crops. Put simply, GM crops are not 'feeding the world'.

Why have GM crops failed to be the popular success the industry claims them to be?

Download report here: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/Agriculture/Twenty-Years-of-Failure/

[cleanhippie]

18. Agreed. Science or ignorant bloggers, the choice is difficult!

[Wellstone ruled]

4. Last Summer had a chance to

observer a Plant Tech from a local Monsanto Office in Southwestern Minnesota. The fellow was taking pollen samples in a field of Seed Corn. Struck up a conversation along the line of toxicity of pollen and the effects on birds and the total disappearance of the Honey Bee population. Long story short,the fellow went to his Pick-up and hand me a ready prepared pamphlet that he was instructed to give to anyone who asks these types of questions. No sir,can not personally answer your questions company policy and I got a family to feed. Politely told to shut my mouth by the young fellow who leased the land and had a Grower contract with Monsanto.

[villager]

5. Sort of like the dispatched posters here -- though not so polite about their "shut your mouth" posts

The discussion itself isn't even allowed, meant to be ridiculed, etc.

That, itself, is quite telling....

[Wellstone ruled]

9. There is more,but I won't go there.

Those of us who have lived or made a living in business or other services,understand the culture and norms of most Rural America. Until something comes up bites them in the ass,then and only then will out comes change. Monsanto is only on blight,you want to really step on toes and get threats,mention anything about the Hog Farms. Or Cancer Nodes in certain areas.

[villager]

10. Unfortunately, none of these ag practices will change until disaster hits

The irony being, it will be a disaster brought on by those very same practices..

[Wellstone ruled]

12. Went down to the river to go rock hounding,

ran across a scene that was not pretty. We got three and half inches of rain two days before,friggin Hog Lagoon spill ran through the local drainage ditches into the river. And that is one hell of a mess.

[villager]

13. Presumably, the owners of the hog "products" will have no financial liability for that mess...

Last edited Tue Jul 5, 2016, 04:05 PM - Edit history (1)

...since those costs are undoubtedly "externalized..."

[Wellstone ruled]

15. Good guess,

it all goes back to who knows who and this operation runs hundred twenty Pork Silos and are one of the big Rethug money go to families.

[progressoid]

8. So what did the pamphlet say?

[GreatGazoo]

6. Fits with this: The War on GMO-Food Critics

What we’re seeing is a concerted campaign to do exactly what National Geographic has knowingly or unknowingly done: paint GMO critics as anti-science while offering no serious discussion of the scientific controversy that still rages.

An indicator was a quiet announcement in the press last summer that the Gates Foundation had awarded a US$5.6 million grant to Cornell University to “depolarize” the debate over GM foods. That’s their word. The grant founded a new institute, the Cornell Alliance for Science.
...
The consensus on the safety of GM food is perfectly clear: there is no consensus. That’s what the independent peer-reviewed literature says. And that’s what the National Geographic’s beautiful exhibit on its food series, in its Washington headquarters, says: the “long-term health and ecological consequences are unknown.“ And that is an accurate statement of the consensus, or the lack of it.

The paid shills for the petroleum industry undermined a growing consensus on climate change that was inconvenient for industry, backed by a well-funded PR campaign sowing doubt about that scientific consensus. In this case, the biotechnology industry and its allies are declaring a consensus where there is none in order to silence their critics.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/war-genetically-modified-food-critics.html

[progressoid]

7. “long-term health and ecological consequences are unknown“

That's a vague statement that can be applied to lots of stuff.


Under arm deodorant: “the long-term health and ecological consequences are unknown.“

Opossums: “the long-term health and ecological consequences are unknown.“

National Geographic TV Channel: “the long-term health and ecological consequences are unknown.“

[kristopher]

11. .

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1016&pid=162822

[villager]

17. Thanks for the reminder!

[Judi Lynn]

19. Terrific information. Thanks. n/t