As happened in both California and Washington state, what seemed like an easy path to victory for supporters of a mandatory GMO labeling law has turned into a dog fight as the voting nears in Oregon while voters in Colorado appear poised to soundly reject the measure.
An Oregonian poll earlier this week showed Measure 92 behind by six points, trailing 48-42. A poll released in July by Oregon Public Broadcasting put support for GMO labeling at 77 percent. The sharp drop-off mirrors what happened in California and Washington, where the labeling forces held would seemed like insurmountable leads until the last month or two of the campaign.
California voters narrowly turned down labeling in 2012. Washington voters rejected a similar measure, I-522, in 2013. Both lost by nearly identical 51-49 margins after leading by 3-1 or more.
What’s behind the pattern of erosion of support as the campaign wears on. Cary Gillam, a Reuters agriculture correspondent known for her anti-GMO bias, claims it’s all about money and advertising by Big Ag.
But as was the case in the two other western states that voted on labeling bills, the more voters learned about the law and the science behind genetically modified crops and foods, the more support eroded.
“Fresh polling showed support for the Oregon GMO labeling law waning in the face of a well-funded onslaught of advertising from labeling opponents,” she wrote. “In both states, the bid for votes on Nov. 4 is largely coming down to the size of each side’s bank account.”
Gilliam then gives the platform to one of the leader’s of the ‘yes on 92′ campaign, who are attempting to massage the news in case the worst happens from their perspective.
“We’re not able to compete with these massive contributions,’ Reuters quoted Larry Cooper, campaign chair for Right to Know Colorado. “I have not written off the campaign. But it is very much a David and Goliath situation.”
In fact, experts in polling and political behavior, backed by numerous studies have shown that the Gillam-anti-GMO theory–money is buys votes on controversial and complicated policy measures–is almost certainly wrong.
Grist’s Nathanael Johnson looked into what may be behind the yes vote collapse pattern after the Washington vote last year. “The Washington vote seems to be telling us that concern about GM food is broad and shallow,” he wrote. “That is, lots of people are vaguely worried about transgenics, but it’s not a core issue that drives majorities to the polls.”
“This was a solution looking for a problem,” he quoted Stuart Elway, president of the Seattle-based polling company Elway Research. “People were not highly agitated about GMO labeling.”
The key, Elway noted, was not the expenditure of money; it was that when people learned about the details of the measure, they came to see it as fraught with problems and unintended consequences.
Wrote Johnson: “While it’s nearly impossible for advertising to shift core values — like getting a lifelong Democrat to vote Republican or vice versa — it is possible for advertising to change the mind of someone who hasn’t fully committed. When people haven’t encountered the arguments on each side, those arguments tend to work.”
Chris Mooney, now writing for the Washington Post, picked up on that theme this week.
[W]hen people tell pollsters they favor GMO labeling, they don’t really know what they’re saying. Because overall public knowledge about GMOs is very low, many GMO polls give “a measure of what people will say they want to label when they have no idea what that means,” explains Yale public opinion researcher Dan Kahan.
In other words, because Americans don’t actually know a lot about genetically modified foods, polls that claim to show overwhelming support for labeling are probably not very reliable. Consider that a push poll conducted by the New York Times found that 93 percent of Americans favor labeling GM food. That’s almost certainly because poll questioners asked people whether they supported GMO labeling. But when not fed the possible answer–when poll takers were asked whether there was any additional information they would like to see on food labels–only 7 percent volunteered they supported labeling.
This is yet another piece of evidence suggesting that public opinion polls purporting to represent overwhelming support for GMO labeling our flat out wrong, despite the propaganda generated by anti-GMO advocacy groups. General polls don’t reflect how people really think about the issue of genetically modified foods or labeling–when they think about it all.
Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a Senior Fellow at the World Food Center, Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy, University of California-Davis. Follow @JonEntine on Twitter
Even when voters reject GMO labeling and banning, the anti-GMO organic activists still win. It becomes part of their sob-story, and as long as they can hold up a few examples of where they have succeeded (Vermont and Jackson County OR) they will carry on.
And the worst part is that we subsidize these urban organic activists with our taxes. It’s extortion plain and simple.
Organic activists.
Organic activists.
Organic activists.
When pray tell will we all stand up and stop these anti-GMO urban organic activists?
Do you mean, by “subsidize with our taxes,” the fact that the organic industry’s Center for Food Safety, behind most of these measures, is a federal 501 (c) (3) charitable nonprofit? They should have their nonprofit status ripped as they are involved in waaaaaay too much political activity to deserve the (c) (3) designation.
Yes, that is ONE way that organic activists are funded by our taxes.
There are also direct government handouts to organic activists by way of what are called transitional organic certification programs.
Then there are all the academics across the land who promote organic farming.
There’s more. But that’s too much already.
Rather comical hearing supporters of big ag talk about unfair government funding. US subsidies of Big Ag have bankrupted indigenous farmers all over the world and forced them off their farms and into sweatshops.
It’s the lack of technology that has forced indigenous farmers off their land. If organic activists weren’t preventing Third-World farmers from using synthetic fertilizer, pesticides and GMOs, those farmers would be every bit as productive as American, Canadian, Australian and Indian farmers are.
Silly.
When I wrote in several forums against GMO labelling and the reason why GMO food is not very different from natural foods (which are not that natural to begin with), I always invariably used to get accused of being in the pay of Big Agri or Monsanto or something like that,inspite of the fact that I have nothing to do with FOod crops or GMO. I am a cancer biologist who had a graduate background in GMO. ha..ha.. So it is not surprising that anti-GMO people keep thinking that guys like me are being paid off by Monsanto and others to “brainwash” the public. If truth is brainwashing, then these guys realy need to rethink their way of thinking.
A lot of us have been accused of being shills 100’s of times. Once you get past refuting their pseudoscience, it is the only thing they have left as an argument.
It’s an extension of schoolyard name calling; “Well,” they say when they have nothing left to say, “You’re a big poo-poo head.” Yeah. Got it.
My favorite though goes something like “well, just pour a cup of Roundup in your cereal!”.
I made that very meme a few weeks ago.
I made that very meme just a coupla weeks ago.
Well, food had always been a big part of any religion, even before that apple incident. :D So, no surprise that science and logic are being ignored.
Worse still, anti-GMO organic activists make death threats.
http://web.archive.org/web/20140724153953/http:/www.monsantocollaborators.org
I would support labeling, even if people’s reasons to avoid GMO’s are irrational or rational, they should have the choice. Kosher, halal, gluten-free, all have their own labels. Also if you knew what had GMO’s in, maybe some people at least would realise they have eaten them and not dropped dead.
The problem with labelling stuff that is of no harm to anyone (1000s of clincal studies have shown no effect), is that then people will want all kinds of voodoo stuff labelled on the bottle, even if that has no scientific basis, like what kind of soil the food was grown in, whether certain kind of people handled the crops or what kind of country and climate or the kind of pesticides and pests in the farm etc. You are opening a Pandora’s box of nonsense when you start trying to advocate unscientific labelling. Religious reasons and health reasons are different from labelling something with a tag that has no scientific basis.
How about labeling organic food produced with mutagenesis? How come I can’t get people all riled up to demand labeling for that? Or the poop content (ok, E. coli) in organic vegetables? Don’t I have a “right” to know that?
The FDA advocates labels when there is an allergenic or safety reason for doing so. Not because Farmer Smith took a dump in his lettuce field (ick, but not illegal, apparently)
Those are great points Judy. Sadly, there is no testing in the organic industry to ensure un-composted feces isn’t making its way into the multibillion dollar organic food chain. So yes, a warming label would be in order.
Fresh organic food needs a Warning label that it needs to be peeled or washed thoroughly.
Folks also need to be warned that it is often grown with the use of pesticides/herbacides and that it is not tested for those. I would love for someone to push for those labels and they would not need folks to segregate crops any more than they are already
Let’s do it!
Kosher and Halal are voluntary labels. Gluten-free has become a marketing label, which, again is voluntary. If companies want to spend more on labeling their food as “non-GMO,” that’s there choice. It should not be mandatory.
“Kosher, halal, gluten-free, all have their own labels.” Those are voluntary labels. The same voluntary labels that GMO-free already falls under.
They are based on religious and health reasons (GLuten allergy isa scientific fact), but GMO labelling does not fall under any category. A right to know basis is only logical when the fact they want to know has a real issue rooted in science which in this case does not exist.
One could argue that the anti-GMO movement is essentially part of a disorganized religion. So GMO labeling has more in common with Halal and Kosher than Gluten labels (celiac disease is real, even if gluten sensitivity is not).
Correction David: the anti-GMO movement is a highly organized, TAX-SUBSIDIZED religion.
There is already existing labels that covers identifies non-GMO product. There is the voluntary “Non-GMO Project”, and there is the “100% Organic” labels that also points people to the GMO free products. Do we need a 3rd label?
Labeling every GMO would also mean you will also need to label every T-shirts and pillow cases, because all cotton is GMO, and it’s the ting that people put their nose next to every night, inhaling those monster fibers into their lungs. :D
All seafood are required to be labeled, yet “recent studies showing that 20 to 25 percent of seafood around the world is mislabeled” as the wrong specie. So…. Labeling will really do nothing to stamp out fraud and human errors.
The Colorado ballot initiative doesn’t tell you that info, Tura. It just says “genetic engineering.” It’s so sloppy it doesn’t even say which ingredient, or %, was genetically modified. So tell me how that helps you make educated decisions. It doesn’t.
Kosher, Halal and gluten free are food processing techniques, GMO is a plant breeding technique. There is no such thing as “GMO food”, they’re SEEDS. So just with any genetic modification via traditional breeding or chemical or radiation mutagenesis, we don’t label food based on how the seeds were bred. If we are going label GMO, then we need to label by plant breeding technique.
Yes; genetic engineering is a process, not a “thing in your food.” Just like mutagenesis / irradiation is a “process,” not a “thing in your food.”
“Kosher, halal, gluten-free, all have their own labels.”
>>Yes, but (and correct me if I’m wrong) those are consumer driven labels. They are not labels that included as a legal requirement. Big difference.
I think Jon you are discounting how much TV advertising does effect Americans. I think many still believe if it’s on the news or TV it must be true. I watched a debate that took place in Oregon with Dana Bieber, perhaps you didn’t see it. Ms. Biebers’ comment about seed treatment on GE crops “every farmer and every scientist in this state knows that’s nothing more than a colored dye that’s on a seed to identify it.” Hmmmm now who is making up data to confuse the voters.
I don’t doubt that advertising has had an effect…in fact it’s key here. When voters are exposed to more information, that can alter some perceptions and ultimately votes. But I think the key point is that support for labels is very shallow across the country. If it was deep, past history has shown that ads alone can’t move the meter that much. The claim that 93% of Americans won’t labeling, invoked by anti-GMO campaigners, is close to meaningless. The advertising also has to be weighed agains the information blitz on the Internet and the fact that most media stir fears on this issue….creating a controversy over GMO safety that doesn’t exist in the science community. So claiming that people are dummy automatons that are easily swayed by advertising doesn’t hold water…either in this case or in classic studies on voter behavior. Sure, a minority swing faction might be, but not enough to change views by 40-60 percentage points. People get; the anti-GMO plays on fear, and that’s been a losing hand, or at least it appears so at this juncture.
The more people learn about genetic engineering (thanks in part to these debates!), and about labeling, the less they support labeling. That’s what exit polls have said over and over and over.
And if only people learned more about the organic industry which opposes the use of GMOs, the more they would reject organic food.
Organic food is, after all, not tested to ensure that feces is kept out, or to ensure that prohibited pesticides are not being used.
The sad result is that there are disproportionate amount of organic food recalls, replete with illnesses and death, and almost HALF of all organic food tests positive for prohibited pesticide residue.
And we subsidize this with our taxes.
The woman outright lied, how is that helpful in any debate?
Larry Cooper has been whining about the amount of $$$ the campaign against labeling has spent, from the beginning. Hey, he’s the one who chose to put it on the Colorado ballot. Didn’t he pay any attention to how that went down in California and Washington? Is he really surprised that farmers, businesses, seed companies, food manufacturers, and scientists oppose it?
The money spent on this campaign ain’t nuttin’ compared to what families would be paying in increased costs, if the labeling initiative was to pass.
The reason it’s looking glum for Larry and his activists is that the more people know about gmos, and about the labeling initiative, the less they are to support it. But it’s not about “big money”; it’s about voter education. Larry’s group hasn’t done a credible job of selling the public on the “need” for this language.
Please, someone; accuse me of being a shill! (actually, for the number of times I’ve said “just buy organic or non-gmo certified foods if you want to avoid GE foods,” I should be getting paid by organic companies as THEIR shill!)
If true, then more outreach from farmers and scientists may yet save the day for this increasingly indispensable technology.
The farmers I know are pretty busy farming; they’re not political activists. But your point is well taken.
And yours is well taken too. A tag team between the farmer and someone close can work. See Nurselovesfarmer. That’s Jay and Sarah Schultz. http://m.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/wheat-kings/article18731866/?service=mobile
And when they lose, the GMOaners *always* cry that the election was “bought off” by Monsanto et al. The identical reaction that most of them jeered when Romney supporters resorted to it.
“while voters in Colorado appear poised to soundly reject the measure.” Does anyone have a source for this? I hope this is true, but I can’t find recent polls on this anywhere.