On November 6th voting in Washington state has put to test a legislative proposal named I-522 aimed to put GMO labeling on foods. It was a battle for what it became obvious as for months two sides campaigned pro and against it.
Both sides had put a lot of efforts to make their case and most importantly to educate the voter on the subject. Proponents of the proposal had voiced their concerns that the public and the consumer has the right to know what goes in their food.
Fair enough you'd say, but some people weren't that much concerned as they were duped to believe, that FDA (food and drugs administration of the US government) can protect their health and interest as if it always succseded to do that.
The other camp, well organized by Big food/Big agriculture lobby (interest groups of the largest food, pesticide and crop producers) has put together not only the joint effort of many, but apparently, secretly funding campaigns to fight against the proposal, arguing that GMO labeling does not give sufficient information about the nutrition and food quality in general.
Further, the argument of Big Food is that appearing on labels, GMO can, uncalled for, scare unnecessarily people and lead to hardly predictable consequences such as: many farmers can go bankrupted and businesses can sustain losses thus having had to let off many of it's workforce, thus contributing to the already hard situation with the employment in the USA and probably in other countries.
For an educated viewer their arguments however seem completely..well, rubbish. Since when FDA was absolutely capable to protect the consumer from bad ingredients in his food? And since when keeping jobs that are created for no good is more important than people's health and lives you might say.
The obvious mistake though, was the act which had made the proponents of the non-disclosure of GMO. The mere fact of admission that with their quality of information they are still driven to ultimately attempt to block proposition I-522 is going to deal a great blow to the public image of those companies. Period.
This has been a classic example of very poor strategy on behalf of the top executives of those companies as their actions nearly "forever" sealed their image as dishonest, non-transparent companies with same kinds of products. That, on top of the one time discovery that companies such as Monsanto have strict policy that requires only organic foods for their corporate board meetings. That is the kind of hypocrisy that will stick.
What might have been better actions and strategy in general, from their perspective? Certainly the strategy of Coca Cola (which by the way is among the list of losers revealed to fight secretly I-522) to put a nice lady doctor on TV to compare non-important stats about organic and non-organic foods to make it look like "after all it seems like there is no big difference between organic and non-organic - sugesting anything else but organic is under "non-organic" label including GMO related products.
To suggest in such way that GMO is nearly the same as quality organic foods is wonderfully dubious claim but certainly better strategy than funding secretly campaign against GMO product labeling.
Satori
Both sides had put a lot of efforts to make their case and most importantly to educate the voter on the subject. Proponents of the proposal had voiced their concerns that the public and the consumer has the right to know what goes in their food.
Fair enough you'd say, but some people weren't that much concerned as they were duped to believe, that FDA (food and drugs administration of the US government) can protect their health and interest as if it always succseded to do that.
The other camp, well organized by Big food/Big agriculture lobby (interest groups of the largest food, pesticide and crop producers) has put together not only the joint effort of many, but apparently, secretly funding campaigns to fight against the proposal, arguing that GMO labeling does not give sufficient information about the nutrition and food quality in general.
Further, the argument of Big Food is that appearing on labels, GMO can, uncalled for, scare unnecessarily people and lead to hardly predictable consequences such as: many farmers can go bankrupted and businesses can sustain losses thus having had to let off many of it's workforce, thus contributing to the already hard situation with the employment in the USA and probably in other countries.
For an educated viewer their arguments however seem completely..well, rubbish. Since when FDA was absolutely capable to protect the consumer from bad ingredients in his food? And since when keeping jobs that are created for no good is more important than people's health and lives you might say.
The obvious mistake though, was the act which had made the proponents of the non-disclosure of GMO. The mere fact of admission that with their quality of information they are still driven to ultimately attempt to block proposition I-522 is going to deal a great blow to the public image of those companies. Period.
This has been a classic example of very poor strategy on behalf of the top executives of those companies as their actions nearly "forever" sealed their image as dishonest, non-transparent companies with same kinds of products. That, on top of the one time discovery that companies such as Monsanto have strict policy that requires only organic foods for their corporate board meetings. That is the kind of hypocrisy that will stick.
What might have been better actions and strategy in general, from their perspective? Certainly the strategy of Coca Cola (which by the way is among the list of losers revealed to fight secretly I-522) to put a nice lady doctor on TV to compare non-important stats about organic and non-organic foods to make it look like "after all it seems like there is no big difference between organic and non-organic - sugesting anything else but organic is under "non-organic" label including GMO related products.
To suggest in such way that GMO is nearly the same as quality organic foods is wonderfully dubious claim but certainly better strategy than funding secretly campaign against GMO product labeling.
Satori
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