Monsanto's Mommy Bloggers and Clandestine Spies [View all]

[womanofthehills]

From Mommy Bloggers to Clandestine Spies, Here's How Monsanto's PR Company Controls the GMO Debate
Big Ag public relations has an image problem of its own. - It's a longish article but worth the read. Some excerpts.

Sen. Bernie Sanders sent out an email to supporters Friday asking them to take action against a Senate bill that would overturn Vermont's recent legislation requiring companies to label products containing genetically modified organisms.

"The corporate interests are at it again," Sanders wrote. "Monsanto, agribusiness and the bio-tech industry have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to overturn legislation passed by Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and Alaska that calls for the labeling of GMO food. In fact, they are moving aggressively now because Vermont's strong law goes into effect today."

For many, the most incredible aspect of Big Ag’s push for increased use of GMOs is the fervency with which these companies lobby against bills that would require labels for foods that contain GM ingredients. Industry executives argue that labels scare consumers away from purchasing genetically modified foods. As blogger Ana Picazo told Modern Farmer, “People deserve to know what’s in their foods. It’s called informed consent.”

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.

Andre Kimball, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, agrees, telling Huffington Post, “We are appalled that our elected officials would support keeping Americans in the dark about what is in our food and even more appalled that they would do it on behalf of Big Chemical and food corporations.”

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