What are they thinking?
I am writing in response to an Aug. 31 commentary by the Lake County Chamber of Commerce regarding Proposition 37 — the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act.
The executive committee of the Lake County Chamber of Commerce apparently got a memo from the chamber”s national directors telling them to oppose Proposition 37. Their response, based on boilerplate from an FDA official, is a half-hearted plea for caution and a link to the bureaucratic party line.
The author of the FDA material is James Maryanski, the Biotech Coordinator for the FDA. He joined the agency in 1977 and has been in charge of coordinating their bio-tech policy since 1986. In other words, he”s a career FDA man who”s spent the last quarter decade pushing for the domination of our food supply by gigantic firms who own the patents on genetically engineered crops like corn, soy and sugar beets. Maryanski is one of the few heavy-hitters in the FDA who has not worked for Monsanto or some other pesticide or bio-tech company, but he is clearly committed to Monsanto”s “nothing grown that we don”t own” cause.
The chamber”s call for caution is off-target. The FDA doesn”t test GE foods for safety ? they merely evaluate the carefully selected information that the companies choose to voluntarily submit. FDA whistle-blowers have been complaining for years that it”s a rubber stamp process and evidence of harmful effects has been routinely covered up or ignored. The FDA requires no long-term safety studies and none are done by companies requesting approvals. After all, they want their product onto the market as quickly as possible, no time to let caution get in the way of profits.
Maryanski believes GE foods are safe until they are found to be harmful. Instead of requiring independent research that will really show whether the products are safe, caution has been thrown to the wind and all of us are the bio-tech industry”s guinea pigs.
As far as the hair-on-fire claims that this law will make food unaffordable and the poor will starve, anyone who reads labels knows that food producers reprint and redesign labels regularly, and changes to ingredients and formulations occur fairly regularly. When Prop. 37 passes, the law allows the addition of information about GE ingredients to be done as other routine changes are made to labels.
Complaints that the law doesn”t cover this or that are intentional distractions from the real issue, the right to know. The law was designed to have a limited scope. If the exemptions didn”t exist, the same parties who are complaining about exemptions now would be complaining that there are no exceptions and how that”s unfair to this or that producer or agricultural sector.
The argument that shoppers should buy Certified Organic products if they want to avoid GE food is also defective.
Many times there is no organic version of a product available, yet there may be a conventionally-produced product with no GE ingredients sitting next to a similar item that contains GE ingredients. With labeling we”d have that information.
More than 90 percent of consumers believe that we should have that knowledge available to us when we buy groceries.
The only opponents to labeling are those who profit from GE products. Big players in the national chamber are telling local chambers to toe the party line. Ironically, these powerful bio-tech companies are accustomed world of tax subsidies and preferential treatment by regulatory agencies — they sure don”t want to take any chances with the free market!
The issue of labeling and choice is not complex at all. It”s obvious that we Americans have the same right to know what we are eating as citizens of European countries, Japan, Malaysia and Australia. Is the chamber really telling us that Americans should not be entitled to the same rights as the British or French? That we should reject the right to know what we are eating and just listen to the experts who know best at the FDA? Executive committee of the Lake County Chamber of Commerce, are you serious?
Roberta Actor-Thomas is a software consultant in Lakeport.
