Consumerism and GM Foods

One area where conservatives have had a real blindspot is recognizing misbehavior by corporations. All an oil company has to do is scream “commies tryin’ to steal our jobs!” and any number of conservative pundits will jump to defend them. That does seem to be changing though. Let’s talk about this in the context of the “Monsanto Protection Act” (MPA) and Genetically Modified (GM) crops.

The MPA isn’t actually called that. What it is, is a rider placed anonymously into a spending resolution in the Senate. It passed both chambers very quietly, with most Congress critters claiming they didn’t even know they had voted for it, and Obama signed it. No one has admitted to placing it into the bill, but Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo) has admitted that he “worked with Monsanto” to draft the rider, and it appears the thing was put into the bill by Blunt or the late Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii). What it does is that it bars federal courts from halting the sale or planting of GM seeds even if the court finds the seeds to be harmful. This appears to be in response to a 2010 ruling by a federal court that ordered the USDA to halt Monsanto from planting GM sugar beets after the court found that the USDA approved the planting of those beets before the environmental impact assessment was even completed. In other words, the USDA declared it safe before its own scientists studied whether or not it was safe. Naturally, we can’t have courts doing things like that to stop our corporate masters!

But this is nothing new for Monsanto. They use the courts like a weapon and they are THE poster boy for “cronyism.” Consider the case of bovine growth hormone. That growth hormone is used in cows in the US because the USDA approved it. It was approved by Michael Taylor of the USDA. Before joining the USDA, Taylor was a Monsanto lobbyist. After approving it, he returned to Monsanto as a Vice President. The USDA approved it after the FDA declared it safe. The FDA reached that conclusion based on a report submitted by Monsanto about the hormone’s safety. The FDA employee who examined the Monsanto report and approved it was Margaret Miller. Before joining the FDA, Margaret Miller worked for Monsanto AND she wrote the very report she would then approve at the FDA. In other words, she wrote a report claiming this stuff was safe when she worked for Monsanto, that report was submitted to the FDA, Miller then moved to the FDA, where she reviewed her own report and approved it. Talk about a rigged game! But is there any reason to think the hormone isn’t safe? Well, Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada all ban it. Want another example of cronyism? Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddiqui, took a job at the USDA, where he wrote the USDA’s “organic food standard,” which allows GM foods to label themselves “organic.”

“Coincidentally,” the USDA has never denied a single application by Monsanto to use GM crops. Yet, it is interesting to note that Monsanto does not have similar success anywhere else in the world. GM foods are banned or labeled in 60 countries. In fact, Monsanto has stopped trying to change the laws in Europe to get GM crops approved because: “We’re going to sell the GM seeds only where they enjoy broad farmer support, broad political support and a functioning regulatory system.” Translation: they’re only going to sell where they can control the regulators. Hey, that’s us!

So what’s the danger?

Well, leaving aside the health question, there is this problem: GM foods are banned or labeled in 60 countries. When GM crops are planted here, there is a high risk that these crops will contaminate other fields, as just happened in Oregon – Monsanto blamed “saboteurs” (the rest of you call those things wind and birds). When that happens, it becomes impossible to separate the GM from non-GM products as they mix. Since GM products are banned in a vast number of countries, a few careless GM farmers can potentially destroy the ability of all American farmers to export their products.

That’s the concern with salmon. The FDA is in the process of approving a GM salmon created by a company called AquaBounty. Their salmon grow faster and twice as large as normal salmon. And while GM proponents typical (falsely) claim that their products are no different than selective breeding and thus “could be found in nature,” the salmon completely disproves that. This thing was engineered with genes from eels and could never be found in nature. It is a true frankenfish, and the salmon industry is freaked out about this because consumers don’t want these things and, if they escape into the wild, it will be impossible to tell real salmon from the frankensalmon. If that happens, it will kill the US salmon industry as consumers shift to salmon from other parts of the world. It’s also not clear what will happen if these mongo salmon start eating everything in sight.

AquaBounty, like all other GM food makers, not only opposes mandatory labeling, but it opposes letting others label their salmon as non-GM. Why oppose voluntary labels? Because consumers don’t want this GM stuff and the industry knows that. This is why Monsanto has given up on Europe, because their regulators won’t let them hide the GM products amidst the others and Monsanto has concluded: “We’ve come to the conclusion that this has no broad acceptance at the moment.” And they know that if companies start labeling their products as free of GM materials, then the products made from GM materials will be abandoned. Yep.

I’ve discussed this briefly in my book, but the Republicans need to latch onto these issues and stop being patsies for industry. When (not if) these things escape, we could be looking at billions of dollars in lost sales as other countries ban our foods.

Even more importantly, though, why are we helping companies hide information consumers want? Consumerism lies at the heart of conservatism because consumerism is about letting billions of consumers make their own choices. . . it IS the free market and conservatives should never support laws that seek to control consumers to protect the politically connected. Robbing people of knowledge is no different than forcing them to do what you want. It’s time conservatives grasped that and stopped believing that industry is always good. Industry is great... when it satisfies consumers. But when it uses the government to control consumers, then it’s evil. Pure and simple.

Fortunately, some conservatives are starting to get this. Mixed in with the consumer advocates, environmentalists, and food safety advocates who are opposing things like the Monsanto Protection Act are Tea Party people. Said the blog of the Tea Party Patriots: this is “a special interest loophole and a doozy at that. This is a situation in which a company is given the ability to ignore court orders, in what boils down to a deregulation scheme for a particular set of industries.” Yep.

Keep this principle in mind: companies turn to the government when they can’t win over consumers in a free and fair market place. The role of the government should always be to ensure that producers are as free as possible to offer what they think consumers want AND that consumers are free to make informed decisions about what they want. For free markets to work, you can’t just support half that equation.