This article originally ran at Forbes and has been republished here with permission.
“You know I am your chief lobbyist in the campaign.” –Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta to Gary Hirshberg, chairman of Stonyfield Farm organic yogurt company and foe of biotechnology, in a WikiLeaks email.
The WikiLeaks release of hacked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s advisers not only offered a peek into the daily machinations of a presidential campaign but also exposed the business-as-usual influence-peddling within the Clinton machine that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency. Many of these folks had already been selecting offices in the West Wing and are shell-shocked. But few people are likely as disappointed and rendered as irrelevant overnight as Gary Hirshberg, the wealthy founder of Stonyfield Farm, maker of organic yogurt. Hirshberg, who has been monomaniacal in his opposition to modern genetic engineering applied to agriculture, had a back-channel to John Podesta, the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.
Over the last several years, Hirshberg has spent a large chunk of his personal fortune pushing for mandatory, disparaging labels on genetically engineered foods, or so-called “GMOs” (genetically modified organisms), as a Trojan horse–a first step toward eliminating such products entirely, which would make over-priced organic food products (not coincidentally including Stonyfield’s), more competitive in the marketplace.
What’s the connection between Hirshberg and Podesta? Hirshberg and his wife are major Democratic Party donors who have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawmakers and candidates. The Podesta Group, the lobbying firm run by Podesta before joining the Clinton campaign, lobbies for the Organic Trade Association, a group also funded by Hirshberg. The OTA has paid the Podesta Group $1.25 million in fees since 2012 to lobby on behalf of OTA issues including mandatory labels.
Hirshberg heavily lobbied Congress to pass legislation to force food companies to print “genetically engineered” labels on their products, insisting the issue is consumer-driven, but the released emails reveal there’s much more to the story. They not only expose Hirshberg’s hypocrisy but also demonstrate that he will stop at nothing, even exploiting mothers who want to provide the most healthful foods for their kids. While Hirshberg was using moms as useful props, a January 2016 email to campaign chairman Podesta reveals what he really thinks about them: “…this is in fact one of those topics that is on many women’s minds, not because they know anything about GMOs, but because GMOs are symbolic of the bigger narrative of our foods being produced by people who care only about profits and not really about what is best for our families.”
In other words, he tells Podesta, attacks on genetic engineering are just a rallying cry, a stalking horse for “Big Ag,” which cares “only about profits and not really about what is best for our families,” but which has managed to produce the most diverse, cheapest and safest food supply in human history.
WikiLeaks’ emails remind us that the Democratic Party is dominated by, in the words of Victor Davis Hanson, “rich, snobbish, and often ethically bankrupt grandees.” Hirshberg, the prototype, portrays himself as a champion of consumers’ rights, claiming GMO labels are all about transparency, and he mocks any lawmaker or company that objects to labels as wanting to “keep consumers in the dark,” but his real reason for pushing mandatory “genetically modified” labels is to use them to disparage the modern genetic engineering techniques that are unavailable to the organic industry.
In a June 2015 email to Podesta, Hirshberg lays out a number of outright falsehoods to convince Podesta why Clinton should support his cause:
…there is [sic] very clear and compelling USDA and USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] data demonstrating a strong likelihood of serious health and environmental threats due to the skyrocketing increases in herbicides associated with GMO usage. Leading agronomists and public health scientists are extremely concerned that these trends are rapidly increasing. To me, this is the key reason why citizens need the right to know and therefore [to] choose…
Reality is very different from the propaganda on Planet Hirshberg. The herbicide that been used in greater amounts in conjunction with genetically engineered plants is glyphosate, a non-selective, broad-spectrum herbicide that targets an enzyme in plants not found in humans. It binds to soils, which prevents it from leaching into ground water, and when it unbinds, it is degraded by soil microbes. Because of its extremely benign safety profile and value to farmers, it has become the most popular herbicide worldwide. (Herbicides are essential in agriculture; they control the weeds that compete with crop plants and reduce their yield, and they eliminate the need for backbreaking weeding by hand.)
Hirshberg’s claims that government agencies have found “a strong likelihood of serious health and environmental threats” from glyphosate is a complete fabrication. These were the findings of the USGS study, which collected water samples from 51 streams in the Midwest and measured levels of various herbicides: “Glyphosate was detected in 36 percent of the samples,” and “the highest measured concentration of glyphosate was 8.7 micrograms per liter, well below the MCL [Maximum Contaminant Level] (700 micrograms per liter).” In other words, the highest concentration found was only about one percent of the level that could conceivably be harmful.
A broad scientific consensus holds that the modern techniques of genetic engineering are essentially an extension, or refinement, of the methods of genetic modification that have long been used to improve the qualities of the foods we eat. Except for wild berries and wild mushrooms, virtually all the fruits, vegetables and grains in our diet have been genetically improved by one technique or another–often as a result of seeds being irradiated, or by “wide crosses,” which involve the movement of genes from one species or genus to another in ways that do not occur in nature. But because molecular genetic engineering is more precise and predictable, the technology is at least as safe as–and often safer than–the modification of food products in cruder, “conventional” ways.
The safety record of genetically engineered plants and foods derived from them is extraordinary. Even after the cultivation worldwide of more than 5 billion acres of genetically engineered crops (by more than 18 million farmers in about three dozen countries) and the consumption of more than 4 trillion servings of food by inhabitants of North America alone, there has not been a single ecosystem disrupted or a single confirmed tummy ache.
The economic, health and environmental benefits are remarkable. Every year, farmers planting genetically engineered varieties spray millions fewer gallons of chemical insecticides and substantially reduce topsoil erosion and CO2 released into the atmosphere.
Ironically, it is those benefits, which have been demonstrated repeatedly, that motivate the relentless opposition to modern agricultural practices—the fear by Hirshberg and others in the organic industry that the current gap between organic and conventional agriculture will become a chasm, as technologies and products that are unavailable to organic farmers become ever more efficient and productive and more attractive to consumers.
Last Friday, a New York Times columnist wrote about the white working class supporters of Donald Trump, “When steel mills fail to return to Youngstown, or when new trade deals produce no more magic than the old ones, these economic exiles will wonder how they got betrayed.” Maybe the steel mills and Carrier air conditioner plants won’t come back, but it’s just possible that we’ll see greater governmental transparency and accountability, and a more level playing field. There has been far too much cronyism and pay-to-play at the taxpayers’ expense. The Solyndra and Siga boondoggles and the access to Secretary Clinton’s State Department bought by contributions to the Clinton Foundation are egregious examples.
Could it be that the Trump administration will usher in an era of less manipulation, mendacity, cynical self-interest and faux-consumer advocacy?
Julie Kelly is a food writer and National Review Online contributor. Follow her on Twitter at @julie_kelly2.
Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller.
