With California getting ready to vote on Proposition 37, the fear-mongering ballot initiative that would require the labeling of certain foods made with genetically modified ingredients, a column in Forbes warns that the supposed grassroots movement is not what it seems.
ACSH friend Henry Miller and Jay Byrne say the articles and blogs are promoting Prop. 37 as a brainchild of small-town grandmother Pamm Larry who woke up one morning during the summer of 2011 with the idea for the ballot initiative and transformed it into reality ten months later through the hard work of a decentralized movement of citizens.
In this fable, Granny Pamm (the heroine) is fighting to protect vulnerable children (the victims) from scary genetic engineering pushed by big agribusiness and food companies (the villains). Although it might make a good Hollywood film, it s untrue.
In fact, Prop. 37 was engineered by a hard-core professional activists like Ronnie Cummins of the Minnesota based Organic Consumers Association, Jeffrey Smith of the Iowa-based Institute for Responsible Technology and Andrew Kimbrell of the Washington, DC-based Center for Food Safety. It s also being backed by organic and natural products special interests who spend millions in unreported marketing activities to disparage farming methods and promulgate fraudulent health claims about the foods we eat to no other purpose than to increase sales of their own exorbitantly priced offerings, Byrne and Miller write.
ACSH s Dr. Ruth Kava comments, People who are for Prop. 37 often position themselves as anti-big agribusiness. But, as this article makes clear, the supposed grassroots organization is actually a front for a big business as well.