$36 million has been spent to bombard the airways with scare tactics that labeling of Genetically Modified Organisms will be too costly or litigious. Monsanto, Dupont, Coca-Cola, Bayer Crop Science and other chemical and junk food companies have plenty to lose if Prop 37 wins; however, putting a little ink on a food label won’t raise food prices. In Europe, there were no changes in food costs when labeling of GMOs was mandated.
The current Food and Drug Administration policy, created in 1992, states that the agency is not aware that GMOs are “significantly different”; therefore, “no safety studies are necessary.” But in 1998, a lawsuit forced 44,000 pages of FDA secret internal memos into the public domain. From those documents, it became clear that the FDA had been lying. The overwhelming consensus among the FDA’s own scientists was that GMOs are dangerous. They urged their superiors to require longitudinal studies, but their pleas were ignored.
Monsanto and the FDA have had a revolving door relationship for well over a decade, via Michael Taylor. Taylor was originally Monsanto’s attorney, then was in charge of policy at the FDA, then returned to Monsanto as vice president and now is back at the FDA as U.S. Food Safety Czar. With Taylor in charge, Monsanto and the biotech industry were handed FDA policies that create the illusion that the FDA regulates GMOs, when in fact they are not. Instead, companies like Monsanto can produce their own pseudoscience. “Industry studies,” or studies conducted by Monsanto on their own products, typically last less than 90 days. (Do the effects of products consumed regularly, for years, manifest within 90 days?!) This self-regulating industry is allowed to simply avoid longitudinal studies. If the FDA asks for further information, they’re usually ignored. Ultimately, the FDA reminds Monsanto that it is Monsanto’s responsibility to determine if GM foods are safe. Then Monsanto’s GMOs go to market.
There has only been one human feeding study on GM foods, which found potential problems that were never further investigated. Studies by the American Academy of Medicine determined that GMOs are unsafe, yet the only studies cited by the FDA have all been conducted by the biotech industry itself. A study by the Institute of Science in Society of the soil bacterium Bt, which GM industry injects into corn as an internal insecticide — the toxin breaks open the gut of the insect that eats the corn, found that Bt also destroys human kidney cells and bursts cells in human gastrointestinal tracts (‘leaky gut syndrome’, a modern epidemic). Meanwhile, the biotech industry’s studies claim that this toxin only affects insects.
GMOs boast of being “Roundup ready” crops. These crops were engineered to withstand the onslaught of the herbicide Roundup without dying themselves. But numerous studies of this herbicide indicate it is harmful to animals like cows and pigs, destined for human consumption, whose diet consists of Roundup sprayed corn or soy; it causes birth defects and other reproductive disorders. Lab animals that ate Roundup lost numerous offspring or became infertile. Genetically Modified crops have led to a 404 million pound increase in overall pesticide use from the time they were introduced in 1996 through 2011 (“Environmental Sciences Europe”).
Many weed species are now resistant to Roundup. Spraying millions of acres every year with a single herbicide has given rise to a plague of Roundup-resistant super-weeds, forcing farmers to apply more and more Roundup and also resort to far-more-toxic products (Tom Philpott, “Genetically Engineered Foods”).
Why is the U.S. one of the last industrialized nations that does not yet label the GMO content of its foods? Might there be a billion-dollar industry in the U.S. that controls the FDA and influences elections?
