This might as well be called the Kill Monsanto bill.  California is set to vote on a ballot initiative – Prop 37 – that would require food companies to properly disclose whether or not any of the ingredients used are genetically modified; it does not prohibit the sale of those products in any way … it simply requires transparency for consumers.  Biotech companies like Monsanto, Dow and Dupont and sugar water companies Coke and Pepsi are spending tens of millions to convince voters not to support transparency in the food that you eat; they really, really don’t want you to know.  Because apparently consumers are not to be trusted making their own decisions and the sky will fall from the heavens should voters declare their support for said law.  And you can see a list of the brands in the graphic below that are trying to prevent your right to know.

If California adopts this – many companies will voluntarily ship all of their products throughout the country with these labels and many other states might use California’s legislation as a model for their own.

The Napa Valley Register gives the background on those corporations spending millions to convince consumeres to vote against the Proposition HERE:

Of course, we’ll be flooded with more of these misleading, fear-based ads, because the opposition has already put up over $32 million to fight our right to know what’s in our food.

Funding the fight against Proposition 37 are biotechnology giants (Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and DuPont) and large food corporations that are all profiting by selling us unlabeled genetically engineered food.

In this struggling economy, they are banking on the idea that they can create enough fear about increased food costs that we will be willing to give up our basic right of informed choice about what we buy and put into our bodies.

The notion that food prices would significantly rise by simply adding one line of information stating that the food is genetically engineered is absurd. Did we notice an appreciable difference in food costs when the much larger block of information about other nutritional data was added to food labels? Of course not.

Natural News says that polling shows Californians to be in favor of the Proposition by large margins HERE:

Proposition 37, the GMO labeling bill that’s on the ballot in California, is polling 2-to-1 in favor of passing, the LA Times is now reporting. 61% of registered voters currently support GMO labeling, and only 25% oppose it.

This high support rate is the result of a massive, decentralized grassroots effort involving non-profits, independent news outlets (like Natural News), educators like Jeffrey Smith, activists like Ronnie Cummins, large financial donors like Dr. Mercola, honest companies like Dr. Bronner, and countless volunteers who have donated their time, money and effort to get Proposition 37 passed.

But this race is nowhere near over. Huge corporations are, of course, lined up in opposition of Proposition 37 because they don’t want you to know that you’re eating GMO. Monsanto, Dupont, Coca-Cola, Pepsico and all the other usual suspects have funneled tens of millions of dollars into defeating Prop 37, and their ads have only begun to start running.

Al Jazeera explains why GMO’s are such a big deal HERE:

On September 19, French researcher Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at Caen University in France,published a groundbreaking study that, for the first time, demonstrates the long-term health effects on rats of eating genetically engineered corn and being exposed to Roundup.

Roundup is a ubiquitous pesticide that is used in conjunction with “roundup ready” seeds – seeds that produce crops designed to survive being sprayed by Roundup.

“The results were alarming,” Professor Séralini told reporters during a telephone press conference held on the day the findings were announced.

According to Professor Séralini, the new study, which was conducted over the course of two years, examined the effects of feeding rats an amount of GE corn that is “comparable to what the American public eats every day”.

After four months, female rats developed mammary and kidney tumours; male rats developed liver and kidney damage. Rats exposed to the chemicals were also more likely to die prematurely.

The Congressional Research Service – a nonpartisan research department within the government wrote a report helping us understand the scope of GMO’s HERE:

An estimated 60%-70% of all processed U.S. foods likely contain some GE material. That is largely because two such crops (corn and soybeans, where farmers have widely adopted GE varieties) are used in many different processed foods. In the United States, biotechnology regulations do not require segregation or labeling of GE crops and foods, as long as they are substantially equivalent to those produced by more conventional methods.

Comments

comments