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Monsanto, USDA Try to Pull a Fast One

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When asked, almost all Americans say they want their food label to say whether the food contains GMOs. So the other day, I’m listening to Marketplace, the business program on NPR, and the host says that Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, has announced a plan to label GMO foods. Wow, I think, that’s great. Finally.

But then the host gave the details.

First of all, labeling will be voluntary. So a food manufacturer won’t be required to label the product. Not only that, but to get the labels, the manufacturer will have to pay a hefty fee to the USDA. Further the labels will be negatively phrased; that is, they will say “This food does not contain genetically modified ingredients.”

There’s a lot wrong with this plan. So much so that I see the biotech industry’s hands all over it. If anything it proves to me that the USDA and companies like Monsanto are pretty darn near indistinguishable. Let’s take a closer look at the plan.

So those manufacturers who don’t want to use GMOs are being taxed, in effect, by having to pay for labels. This puts them at a competitive disadvantage, since the same package of crackers, for instance, without GMOs will cost more than one with GMOs because the manufacturer will pass the cost of the labels on to the customer. Seems designed to discourage manufacturers from buying the labels, doesn’t it?

So there probably will be some labeling, but not much. And what about all the rest of the food at the market? Can we tell if that food is GMO or not? No, because there won’t be a label that says “Contains GMOs. “ That kind of positive statement is the only kind that will let us know which foods are GMO and which aren’t.

Here’s what’s needed: a rule or law that makes it mandatory to label GMO foods. What’s being proposed by USDA is a fast one, sleight of hand, the opposite of what it purports to be.

To add insult to injury, the host of marketplace said labels probably aren’t needed anyway, since the “scientific consensus is that there’s no difference in safety between GMOs and regular foods.” That simply isn’t true. Just recently, hundreds of scientists from around the world signed a declaration saying there is no scientific consensus on GMO safety and that the media should stop lying about it.
Whatever happened to journalism? It wouldn’t have taken the writers at Marketplace more than a half hour to confirm what I’m saying here. But they bought Big Biotech’s Kool-Aid.

Too bad for us.

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