Ever heard that old expression, “hoist with his own
petard” and wondered what it means?
Turns out it comes from the old days of siege warfare, when some unlucky
guy was ordered to pick up the mediaeval equivalent of an IED (the “petard”) and
plant it beneath the iron-studded oaken gate of a fortified city. Explosives being pretty new in those days, it
often happened that the thing would go off before the guy could get rid of
it. Hence the expression.
Whodathunk it?
That’s exactly the kind of result Monsanto & Co. got by wasting
millions of dollars trying to block GMO labeling initiatives (and in most cases
succeeding). In two states alone
(Washington and California) they spent, according to one source, more than
$55,000,000, of which Monsanto’s share fell just short of a whopping $12,000,000.
They should have saved their money.
We first got wind of what was happening several
weeks ago. Costco seldom if ever used to
carry organic produce. Suddenly,
overnight it seemed, the megastore blossomed with organic signs and labels in
almost every food department. Safeway
and other mainstream supermarkets followed suit. What was happening?
Well, frustrated at the ballot box, consumers were
voting with their wallets.
It wasn’t long before even the MSM caught on to the
trend. On April 15th, Mark
Bittman wrote a column on it for the N.Y. Times. “A growing demand for organics, and the
near-total reliance by U.S. farmers on genetically modified corn and soybeans,
is driving a surge in imports from other nations where crops largely are free
of bioengineering”, he opened, and went on to recite a litany of woe for the
GMOers. Since most corn and soybeans become
chicken or cattle feed, GMO varieties can’t be used if the meat is to be
labeled organic. But customers had
decided that if they couldn’t get labels for GMO food, the only way they could
avoid GMO-fed meat was by buying organic.
As a consequence, countries where few if any GMO crops were grown reaped
a bonanza—soybean imports from India doubled in a year, while Romanian corn
increased almost twentyfold. And guess
what?—prices for organic meat are starting to fall already.
The meat story is only part of a much larger trend
that’s featured in a special report, “The War on Big Food” by Beth Kowitt in
the June issue of Fortune magazine. “Major
packaged-food companies lost $4 billion in market share alone last year, as
shoppers swerved to fresh and organic alternatives,” says Kowitt. “This is the most dynamic, disruptive, and
transformational time that I’ve seen in my career” says one food executive with
37 years’ experience. One new organic-food
company has grown to an astonishing $1.2 billion in sales in a space of only
two years.
Of course the trend didn’t begin with the labeling referendums.
Organic-food sales have been growing steadily over the last decade. Most
processed foods contain other things besides GMOs—artificial preservatives
that, ironically, were put there to stop food going bad and sickening people. But, as our experience in Costco showed us,
the trend only reached the tipping point—the point at which retail companies
started to jump the sinking GMO ship—after labeling initiatives in Washington,
California, Oregon and Colorado had failed.
That caused even companies as big and seemingly impregnable as Hershey’s
to look at the sales figures and decide it was time to switch teams. In 2014 Hershey’s had kicked in $258,000 to
defeat the Washington initiative and $493,900 to defeat the California
initiative. But even if you do beat
them, you may still have to join them.
In February of this year Hershey’s announced the start of a campaign to
clean up their act. In future, they
would remove all “unnatural” substances from their products, including milk
from GMO-fed cows and artificial sweeteners made with GMO corn.
It’s interesting to see exactly how the “hoist-with-own-petard”
machinery worked. Prior to the initiatives,
most people had little if any idea of what GMOs were. If instead of jumping immediately into battle
mode the Big Six had just waited on the sidelines, things would probably have
stayed that way. If the vote had gone
against them, as well it might, they could have fought a series of delaying
actions in court—just as they are now doing with the successful initiatives in
Hawaii counties—and meanwhile spent some of the money they’d saved on pro-GMO
propaganda. Thus, even if they didn’t
win back what they lost at the polls, their control over the media and their
relentless “Science, science, science” b.s. could have taken any steam out of
the rush to buy non-GMO-labeled foods.
But no. They made
a big production out of it. GMO foods
were suddenly on every TV and radio station and in every newspaper and magazine. They came front and center to public
awareness as never before. And while
John and Jane Q. Public might buy the arguments about labeling adding to food
costs, they were still far from sure about GMO safety. Why would GMO firms spend all that money if
they weren’t hiding something? So, once
you knew you weren’t going to be able to buy stuff with non-GMO labels, the logical
thing to do was to buy food that had an already-existing label that could by
law be placed only on non-GMO foods.
The Law of Unintended Consequences has struck again. GMOers seem especially prone to it. Look at the “superweeds”, herbicide-resistant
species that Monsanto swore could never be produced by its precious
Roundup. Look at all the GMO wonder products
announced with great fanfare that have quickly fizzled.
The market has its own inexorable logic. Sellers will sell whatever sells. If it stops selling, they’ll switch to
something else. It would be ironic
indeed if GMOs were finally defeated, not by new scientific revelations, not by
government legislation, but by the inscrutable workings of the Invisible
Hand. And those same market forces are
not yet done with GMO foods. Any trend,
once it passes the tipping point, automatically picks up strength as a rolling
snowball picks up snow. Increased demand
causes increased production. Increased
production brings a fall in prices. A
fall in prices results in more and more customers. So even one of the GMOer’s favorite stories--the
one about organic food being just a rich yuppie fad—no longer works for them,
as Mr. & Mrs. Average find growing quantities of competitively priced organic
food on their local supermarket shelves.
GMO firms must be kicking themselves. With their shot foot, in their petard wound.
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