Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser spent decades maintaining and improving his canola crop as farmers have done for millennia — selecting the strongest plants, saving their seeds, and replanting them the following season. One August day in 1998, however, Schmeiser received a letter from Monsanto lawyers informing him he was being sued for patent violation: the company’s “Roundup Ready” canola, a genetically engineered canola that altered the plant’s genes to make it resistant to Roundup herbicide, had been found in Percy’s fields.

As the farm advocacy organization GRAIN explains, “Canadian farmers have a long and strong tradition of seed saving, especially in the western prairies where Schmeiser is from. Canola, the crop Schmeiser grew, is itself a product of farmer seed saving, farmer selection, and publicly funded research. It’s an example of what plant breeding can accomplish without patents. It’s also an example of why co-existence between GM (genetically modified) and non-GM crops is impossible. Today, all of the canola acreage in Western Canada is contaminated with Monsanto’s patented ‘Roundup-Ready’ gene.”

What ensued was an epic David vs. Goliath battle that pit the rights of farmers to save and replant seeds against agribusiness attempts to make it ever-more difficult for farmers to plant anything but their patented varieties. Percy did not set out to be an anti-biotech activist. But the pollen from genetically engineered crops blown onto his farm — and Monsanto’s legal intimidation — sealed his fate as a globally recognized seed and farm justice leader.

The stakes were, and still are, high. It’s a struggle to protect the world’s Native, farmer-bred, and publicly-funded plant varieties—the foundation of global food security and climate resilience—from obliteration by privately-controlled GE crops. It’s a struggle to hold those agribusiness corporations accountable for their technologies instead of criminalizing hapless farmers who, as Percy always maintained, never wanted or benefitted from GE seeds.

Percy ultimately lost that court battle — but he grew the movement. In 2018, looking back on his 20-year fight against Monsanto, he commented: “In the end it turned out good and we brought the world’s attention to what GMOs do and what it could do to farmers… We always felt if you grow a product or a seed on your land you should have the right to reseed it and that right should not be taken away.”

Percy Schmeiser passed away last week at 89 years old, just as a major motion picture about his life, starring Christopher Walken, is being released (view the “Percy” trailer on YouTube).

Meanwhile, Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) and other agribusiness giants aggressively pursue the monopolization of seed markets, the rewriting of seed and patent laws in their favor, and the criminalization of farmers’ seed saving practices.

Around the world — and in the Global South especially, where most of the world’s seed diversity is managed for local food security — small farmers and their allies continue to fight for the right to save and share seeds. For the international peasant farmer confederation La Vía Campesina, “seed sovereignty” is a cornerstone of agroecology and food sovereignty. Now more than ever, Indigenous seed keeping knowledge and practices are recognized as critical to our collective response to the climate crisis. And of course, anyone can save seeds and be part of the global seed sovereignty movement.

Rest in Power, Percy Schmeiser. And long live the seed keepers.

The post In Memoriam: Farmer and Seed Saving Crusader Percy Schmeiser appeared first on Real Food Media.

Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser spent decades maintaining and improving his canola crop as farmers have done for millennia — selecting the strongest plants, saving their seeds, and replanting them the following season. One August day in 1998, however, Schmeiser received a letter from Monsanto lawyers informing him he was being sued for patent violation: the company’s “Roundup Ready” canola, a genetically engineered canola that altered the plant’s genes to make it resistant to Roundup herbicide, had been found in Percy’s fields.

As the farm advocacy organization GRAIN explains, “Canadian farmers have a long and strong tradition of seed saving, especially in the western prairies where Schmeiser is from. Canola, the crop Schmeiser grew, is itself a product of farmer seed saving, farmer selection, and publicly funded research. It’s an example of what plant breeding can accomplish without patents. It’s also an example of why co-existence between GM (genetically modified) and non-GM crops is impossible. Today, all of the canola acreage in Western Canada is contaminated with Monsanto’s patented ‘Roundup-Ready’ gene.”

What ensued was an epic David vs. Goliath battle that pit the rights of farmers to save and replant seeds against agribusiness attempts to make it ever-more difficult for farmers to plant anything but their patented varieties. Percy did not set out to be an anti-biotech activist. But the pollen from genetically engineered crops blown onto his farm — and Monsanto’s legal intimidation — sealed his fate as a globally recognized seed and farm justice leader.

The stakes were, and still are, high. It’s a struggle to protect the world’s Native, farmer-bred, and publicly-funded plant varieties—the foundation of global food security and climate resilience—from obliteration by privately-controlled GE crops. It’s a struggle to hold those agribusiness corporations accountable for their technologies instead of criminalizing hapless farmers who, as Percy always maintained, never wanted or benefitted from GE seeds.

Percy ultimately lost that court battle — but he grew the movement. In 2018, looking back on his 20-year fight against Monsanto, he commented: “In the end it turned out good and we brought the world’s attention to what GMOs do and what it could do to farmers… We always felt if you grow a product or a seed on your land you should have the right to reseed it and that right should not be taken away.”

Percy Schmeiser passed away last week at 89 years old, just as a major motion picture about his life, starring Christopher Walken, is being released (view the “Percy” trailer on YouTube).

Meanwhile, Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) and other agribusiness giants aggressively pursue the monopolization of seed markets, the rewriting of seed and patent laws in their favor, and the criminalization of farmers’ seed saving practices.

Around the world — and in the Global South especially, where most of the world’s seed diversity is managed for local food security — small farmers and their allies continue to fight for the right to save and share seeds. For the international peasant farmer confederation La Vía Campesina, “seed sovereignty” is a cornerstone of agroecology and food sovereignty. Now more than ever, Indigenous seed keeping knowledge and practices are recognized as critical to our collective response to the climate crisis. And of course, anyone can save seeds and be part of the global seed sovereignty movement.

Rest in Power, Percy Schmeiser. And long live the seed keepers.

The post In Memoriam: Farmer and Seed Saving Crusader Percy Schmeiser appeared first on Real Food Media.

Dewayne Johnson with his sons. Photo courtesy of Baum Hedland Law Firm.

There is real momentum in the fight against agrochemicals and the companies that peddle them. After a landmark victory in Hawai’i banning the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos in the state, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to do the same—nationwide. The EPA has 60 days to comply.

That same week, we watched on pins and needles as the Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto Company case unfolded in a San Francisco courtroom. Johnson’s lawyers argued that Roundup and Ranger Pro—proprietary mixtures of glyphosate and other toxic ingredients produced by Monsanto (recently bought out by Bayer) —he had used while working as a groundskeeper at a San Francisco Bay Area school was a substantial factor in his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

As the verdict was read in Johnson’s case late on a Friday afternoon, we couldn’t believe our ears. Our Real Food Media team was calling and texting up a storm, reeling from the news that David had defeated Goliath: the jury ruled that the company acted with malice and negligence in failing to warn consumers and awarded the plaintiff $289 million in damages (Bayer shares immediately plunged in value). Read Anna’s reflections on the trial in Civil Eats.

This was the first Roundup cancer lawsuit to proceed to trial. There are around 8,000 other plaintiffs waiting in the wings.

The effects of this historic trial are rippling out in other ways, too: two California cities, Novato and Benicia, have gone Roundup-free and Santa Rosa has banned the use of Roundup in city parks. Following the landmark verdict, Monsanto is also getting renewed attention for its manufacture of other toxic substances, such as Agent Orange, which the company supplied to the US military during the Vietnam War. Vietnam is now demanding compensation from the company for the effects of Agent Orange—including birth defects, cancers, and other deadly diseases from which millions suffer to this day.

To all the activists, movements, frontline communities, and advocacy organizations working to get toxic chemicals banned and justice for those placed in harm’s way, we want to say: Thank you. Your hard work is paying off. Let’s keep the momentum going!

Want to throw some additional shade on Monsanto (now owned by Bayer)? Head to Corporate Accountability’s website and vote for Bayer (AKA #StillMonsanto) in their Corporate Hall of Shame.

Header image from Sustainable Pulse

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Get 20% off using code 4REAL when buying from the publisher at www.islandpress.org/book/whitewash.

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When you look to the year ahead, what do you see? Ensia recently invited eight global thought leaders to share their thoughts. In this interview with Ensia contributor Lisa Palmer for Ensia’s 2017 print annual, Real Food Media founder Anna Lappé responds to three questions: What will be the biggest challenge to address or opportunity to grasp in your field in 2017? Why? And what should we be doing about it now?

The food system is one of the largest forces impacting our planet’s environment and people’s health. The choices about what crops are grown, where and how they are produced, who gets access to that food and who makes those decisions all have global consequences.

One of the challenges to achieving a more sustainable and fair food system is cor­porate consolidation in the food sector. Consider the latest proposed merger be­tween global giants Bayer and Monsanto pending antitrust approval. And remem­ber, DuPont-Dow, Syngenta–Chem China and Monsanto-Bayer (if the mergers go through) aren’t agriculture companies first — they’re chemical companies.

Particularly worrisome is that these multi­national corporations are focused on just a handful of commodity crops, while we know global food security comes from supporting biodiversity. We know that corporate control leads to political cap­ture as corporations use lobbying dollars and campaign contributions to shape public policy and regulation, with enor­mous implications for the environment and food safety. We also know that once four or fewer corporations control more than 40 percent of a market, true com­petitiveness is compromised: Consumers and farmers lack real choice and fair pric­es. Consolidation puts food workers and small-scale farmers at risk, and it increases vertical integration, further hurting farm­ers’ ability to compete.

To achieve greater food sovereignty, we need to embolden our regulators to take antitrust action against these mergers. We need to see these not as simply business deals for Wall Street analysts to angst over, but as deals that affect the very essence of our food system.

Originally published in Ensia

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In the fall of 1962, a group of chemical companies including Monsanto – at the time the largest producer of the cancer-causing chemical compound, PCB – launched a full-throttle public relations campaign against Silent Spring and its author, biologist Rachel Carson.

In Silent Spring, Carson dared to take on the world’s biggest chemical companies, explaining that their products were not only harmful to birds and bees, but to humans, too. In the wake of its publication, the chemical industry PR machine kicked into gear. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent attempting to discredit not only the book but the ‘hysterical’ woman who wrote it,” says Kaiulani Lee, the playwright and actor who wrote and performs the definitive play about Carson, A Sense of Wonder.

In addition to paying spokespeople to tarnish Carson’s reputation, Monsanto also sent a parody to newspapers around the country. In “The Desolate Year,” Monsanto painted a frightening picture of a world without chemicals. It was a bleak place. “Genus by genus, species by species, sub-species by innumerable sub-species, the insects emerged,” the article warned. “Creeping and flying and crawling. … They were chewers, and piercer-suckers, spongers, siphoners and chewer-lappers, and all their vast progeny were chewers – rasping, sawing biting maggots and worms and caterpillars.” It goes on and on like this for five pages. (As we now know, that diatribe was fear-mongering, not fact-marshalling. Organic and low-chemical farmers across the United States are proving that you can eliminate, or greatly reduce, toxic chemical use on the farm without having to worry about being overrun by pests, weeds, or diseases.)

I can’t help but notice that in its recent PR missives against anti-GMO activists, Monsanto, which is today the world’s largest manufacturer of genetically modified seeds, is using the same fear tactics. Only this time, it’s stirring up fear of a world without biotech crops.

In a recent debate on NPR, Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer, Robert Fraley, sounded remarkably like “The Desolate Year.” “What I’d like to do is [describe] what it would be like to live in a world without GMO crops,” Fraley said in his closing statement. “Without GMOs, farmers would need to dramatically increase their use of herbicides and insecticides. [T]he pressure … will drain more wetlands, will cut down more forests. We [will] have to take tractors and run up and down the fields … and release more greenhouse gas emissions. Banning GMO crops is equivalent to putting 26 million new cars on the road. … I hope, for the sake of all the people … that you vote to … support GM food.”

Despite Fraley’s dire warnings, feeding the future doesn’t depend on GMOs. In fact, the spread of GMOs is actively undermining our ability to feed future generations by locking farmers into dependence on expensive seeds and inputs, by undermining soil health, by reducing biodiversity, and more.

Keep in mind that the main GM traits that have been commercialized convey just two qualities, or a combination of them: pest- and weed-resistance. Industry promises for big nutrition or yield improvements have not borne fruit. Studies show that non-GM corn and soybean yields in Europe, for example, are similar to the yields achieved with GMOs here in the US.

What’s more, we know that the ecologists who warned that GMOs would spur weed and pest resistance were right. As Jonathan Foley, the head of the California Academy of Scientists, has said: “You can’t put out a weed-resistant crop and expect the weeds to sit still. They will evolve.” They will, and they have. Today, we have Roundup-resistant weeds, some with stalks so thick that they can damage farm equipment. And we have Bt-resistant bugs so defiant they’ve got corn growers in our Midwest worried. “Every ecologist predicted that,” Foley says.

As with the chemicals Carson raised the alarm about, when it comes to genetic engineering, the risks are too great, the rewards too minimal, the alternatives too ample to do anything but to stand up to this latest wave of industry fear-mongering.

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

Photo by Mike Mozart/Flickr

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by Anna Lappé 

In October in Istanbul, farmers, agricultural researchers and advocates from around the world gathered for the Organic World Congress, organized by the 42-year-old International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM). With 800 affiliates in 124 countries, IFOAM comes together every three years to gauge its global efforts to promote chemical-free farming, share innovations and address challenges to growth.

The research presented to packed auditoriums detailed the evidence of the multiple benefits of organic farming — what Europeans call multifunctionality. For one, farmers benefit because instead of needing to purchase costly chemicals, genetically engineered seeds and synthetic fertilizer, they can largely work with the ecological systems of their own farmscapes to fend off pests and promote fertility. Organic farming benefits the rest of us too. These low-input practices promote biodiversity (key to food security), protect pollinators (key to one-third of the food we eat), reduce farm energy use while storing more carbon in the soil (key to fixing climate change) and foster clean water and air (key to, well, everything).

Half a world away in Des Moines, Iowa, the annual World Food Prize celebrated a very different kind of farming that is reliant on petrochemicals, synthetic fertilizer and genetically engineered seeds. The prize, created in 1986, ostensibly recognizes achievements that have “advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.” This year’s event featured speakers from some of the world’s largest food companies, including PepsiCo and Walmart, reps from chemical companies such as Bayer CropScience and DuPont and Monsanto’s CEO Robert Fraley who, along with two colleagues, was awarded the prize a year earlier.

Accepting the prize in 2013 for his work on genetic engineering, Fraley said, “Biotechnology crops make farming more productive and mitigate agriculture’s impact on our environment by reducing soil erosion, conserving water and reducing other agricultural inputs.” He added, “New products have the potential to enable us to reduce the impact of drought and enhance yield and nutrition.”

It sounds so promising, doesn’t it? It even sounds as though genetically engineered crops may have many of the multifunctional benefits associated with organic farming. On the basis of claims such as these, Fraley likes to say that genetically modified organism (GMO) technology is key to feeding the world. But its track record disproves its ability to deliver on this promise.

Calling Monsanto’s Bluffs

It’s unsurprising that Fraley is going to the mat for biotech beating back hunger. He’s got a dog in this race. In 2013, Monsanto brought in $15 billion in sales from its two main divisions — biotech seeds and agricultural chemicals — and spent millions lobbying Capitol Hill and the State Department to gain support for genetically engineered products in the U.S. and overseas.

Genetically engineered seeds were first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1982, GMO products first hit grocery stores in 1994, and GMO crops were planted on more than 100 million acres by 1999. So have they delivered on Fraley’s promises? We need not rely on his claims alone; there’s a 17-year track record to examine.

To date, Monsanto has focused on just a handful of engineered traits: Seeds have been modified to either be insect- or herbicide-resistant or are stacked with multiple traits that do both. Most of these seeds are engineered with a gene from the soil bacterium Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), causing the seeds to produce a protein toxic to certain insects. The seeds engineered to be herbicide-tolerant are paired with Monsanto’s proprietary herbicides (such as Roundup), completing the chain of intellectual property — and profit.

Fraley says Monsanto’s crops are key to feeding the world, but these engineered traits have largely been introduced in just three commodities, most of which wind up in the bellies of livestock or the tanks of cars. In 2013, 64 percent of Monsanto’s seed sales came from corn, 16 percent from soy and 7 percent from cotton. Only 13 percent of sales came from other vegetables and seeds — the kind of food we eat.

Also, Monsanto seeds are being grown and sold only in a few countries. According to its 2013 report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, five countries — the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil — account for 79 percent of the company’s seed sales. And in 2005, 40 countries had restrictions or bans on genetically engineered crops, according to the Center for Food Safety.

And what about Fraley’s bold claims that these seeds make farming more productive and lessen agriculture’s footprint? Sticking with the narrowest definition of productivity — yield per acre — Monsanto’s record is underwhelming. The company likes to point out that yields for corn planted in the U.S. from 1996 to 2008 rose by 28 percent. (GMO corn seeds were first widely planted by the late ’90s.) But this confuses correlation with causation. Yields did shoot up in those years, but the increases had little to do with GMO seeds; we have conventional breeding and other improvements in farming methods to thank. One estimate (PDF) puts the yield increase in that period that could be associated with genetic engineering of insecticidal traits at a paltry 4 percent, one-sixth the benefits attributable to conventional breeding and farming.

Plus there is strong evidence linking biotech crops to negative environmental effects. The increased use of glyphosate-based herbicides thanks to Monsanto products has led to an alarming rise in herbicide-resistant weeds, to give just one example.

As for Fraley’s claim that Monsanto’s engineered seeds are reducing soil erosion and water and chemical use, look at the record and, yes, there was a decline in soil erosion on cropland in the U.S. since the introduction of engineered seeds, but once again, it’s not because of these crops. The introduction of engineered seeds happened to coincide with the introduction of federal policies to encourage better conservation practices codified in the 1985 Farm Bill.

There is little evidence (PDF) that engineered seeds conserve water. In contrast, organic techniques improve water efficiency on farms. Building healthy soil has been found to lower soil temperatures, which in turn reduces water lost to evaporation. Farms that eschew synthetic fertilizer and petrochemicals have also been found to have more organic matter in their soils, which allow them to retain more water.

Fraley’s allegations that his technology reduces the use of agricultural chemicals is a bit of an ironic argument, given that the company is a pesticide manufacturer, pulling in more than $4 billion in herbicide sales in 2013 (including the herbicide Harness, whose active ingredient, acetochlor, the Environmental Protection Agency has classified as a possible carcinogen) and that the company was a leading producer of some of the nation’s most toxic pesticides, including the defoliant Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War.

Those facts aside, the evidence shows that GMO technology is increasing the use of agricultural chemicals, not decreasing it. In one peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Sciences Europe, Chuck Benbrook, a research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University, found that though herbicide-resistant crop technology was found to reduce insecticide application slightly, GMO seeds increased overall pesticide use by about 7 percent from 1996 to 2011.

Don’t Panic, Go Organic

Unlike Monsanto’s claims about the benefits of biotech, the organic farmers and advocates gathered at that IFOAM meeting in Istanbul were reporting on real, documented results. Organic farming practices around the world are reducing erosion, conserving water and reducing chemical applications while not bankrupting farmers with costly fertilizers.

It was thus unsurprising to hear that many farmers who started out in chemical agriculture are turning to this approach. In Istanbul we heard from Famara Diedhou from Senegal, who talked about integrating indigenous foods and organic techniques in his region and helping farmers lift themselves out of poverty. We heard from Gabriela Soto from Costa Rica, who shared the benefits the 5,000 farmers in her network were seeing, from greater productivity to lower costs, because of organic practices. We heard from Makereta Tawa from Fiji, who described the movement in her island nation to go 100 percent organic, and from Lyonpo Yeshey Dorji, the minister of agriculture and forests for Bhutan, about his country’s commitment — and it’s almost there — to go 100 percent organic within a decade.

You are likely unfamiliar with these stories. That’s not because the movement is marginal; the IFOAM network has members in more than 100 nations. One reason we aren’t hearing more of these stories is that groups such as IFOAM have a mere sliver of the resources of a company like Monsanto. Consider that the group’s annual budget in 2013 was just 0.01 percent of Monsanto’s sales or that globally less than 1 percent of research dollars for agriculture — public or private — goes into developing and improving organic methods.

We often hear that we can’t feed the world with organic farming because it’s too hard to bring to scale, but we’ve never invested sufficient resources to develop the training, practices and innovations in organic farming that would help us take proven results and scale them up. Meanwhile, many hear Monsanto’s talking points and mistake them for fact. If we are to feed the future, it’s key we look beyond pithy quotes, draw on evidence and demand that our governments and international institutions invest in organic farming and research.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

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Today hundreds of thousands of people around the world — from Burundi to Berlin to Brooklyn — will take to the streets in what organizers are calling the biggest climate march in history. This outpouring of action in the lead-up to this year’s global climate summit in Lima, Peru, is a reflection of the growing frustration with lack of progress in the fight against global warming, from stalemate on emission reductions to an impasse on commitments of support for affected communities.

Progress has been stalled in part because the biggest polluters in the world — those oil and gas companies responsible for the lion’s share of emissions, for example — have been given a seat at the negotiating table, treated as partners and stakeholders at the annual global meetings called the Conference of Parties, or COP. Over the years, these COPs have featured industry-sponsored pavilions, dinners and breakaway meetings. And companies have been granted official observer status through their industry trade associations, which are considered nongovernmental organizations under current climate meeting rules. Some have even attended as official members of country delegations. (For instance, a representative from Shell joined the Nigerian delegation to COP16 in 2010 and Brazil’s to COP14 in 2008.)

As climate activists call for governments to take real action on climate, the decades-long fight against Big Tobacco — specifically, how public health advocates successfully kept companies away from the negotiating table — holds powerful lessons for the role industries should have in these key talks.

Keeping Big Tobacco at Bay

It’s almost impossible to fathom it now, but the first state ban on smoking in hospitals passed only in 1989. By then, decades of research had long proved the connection between nicotine and addiction and shown that smoking causes harm to nearly every organ in the body. The science finally managed to break through industry-funded misinformation campaigns, and in 1998 the United States reached a master settlement with the tobacco industry, which included annual payouts to 46 states of $10 billion for education and public health programs and strict regulations on marketing and advertising cigarettes. Several years later, after still more campaigning, the World Health Assembly unanimously adopted the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Since then, more than 179 countries have ratified it, including Iran and China, although notably not the United States.

Civil society organizations such as Corporate Accountability International (CAI), for which I am an adviser, understood that in order for the convention to have teeth, Big Tobacco could not be allowed to interfere. To that end, CAI and other civil society groups and governments — especially those of Panama, Thailand and South Africa — fought for and secured the inclusion of 30 words that were the jumping-off point for an extensive set of guidelines (PDF) that spurred serious government action. They state, in Article 5.3, “In setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, parties shall act to protect these polices from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry.” These guidelines were adopted unanimously at the 2008 COP (PDF) in Durban, South Africa.

Building on these guidelines (PDF), many governments around the world have gone further to keep the tobacco industry away from policymaking. Colombia passed laws barring tobacco industry representatives from policy negotiations. Australia strengthened transparency laws regarding government interactions with the industry. And in 2009, Norway was the first nation to divest government pension funds from tobacco stock in response to the World Health Organization guidelines that specified governments “should divest all holdings in tobacco companies in order to keep public health interests apart from economic influence.”

Big Tobacco is not granted official observer status at tobacco treaty meetings. In fact, tobacco companies and their trade groups are not allowed to attend or observe the meetings at all. This is made clear in the WHO’s memo (PDF) on attendance policies, which reads, “Persons affiliated or having any relations with the tobacco industry or entities working to further its interests would not be permitted to attend any session or meeting of the COP and its subsidiary bodies.” When industry representatives have attempted to use public badges to gain entry, they have been removed by the Secretariat. The WHO is working on screening public badges to prevent such breaches in the future.

This stark line between negotiators, governments and industry helped create a tobacco treaty with real impact. One of the most widely embraced treaties in U.N. history, it covers almost 90 percent of the world’s population and is projected to save as many as 200 million lives by 2050 — and many millions more thereafter.

As people take to the streets to demand substantial action on climate change, it’s time to take this lesson from the fight against Big Tobacco. Bold action on climate policy is possible only if a stark line is drawn between climate negotiators and the industries driving the crisis: no revolving doors between regulatory positions and corporations, no so-called partnerships with industry that constitute a conflict of interest, no seat at the table in writing the rules of regulation and transparency in all industry engagements with public officials.

Untangle Industry Involvement

Instead, the fossil fuel industry is deeply involved in and actively influencing climate negotiations. For example, the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (whose members include BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell, among other major oil and gas companies) has hosted official side events to the COPs, produced their own reports on strategies for adapting to climate change and advised governments on climate policy. Meanwhile, its members are working in direct opposition to reducing global emissions by expanding oil exploration: BP and Shell, for example, are moving into offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean. Its members have been at the forefront of undermining climate science, with ExxonMobil alone funneling at least $22 million toward climate denial efforts from 1998 to 2011, according to a Greenpeace investigation (PDF).

Last year’s COP19 in Poland saw the participation of the World Coal Association (whose members include General Electric, Rio Tinto and Glencore), including partnering with the Polish Ministry of Economy on an international coal summit to convince U.N. negotiators to embrace coal as a solution to climate change. Out of this partnership came the Warsaw Communiqué, which promotes so-called clean coal, a process that critics point out is no less polluting than standard coal production and is just “a blunt attempt to keep the coal industry in business while governments and taxpayers continue to foot the bill for the damage it causes.”

At 2011’s COP17 in Durban, South Africa, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, made up of fossil fuel and power companies such as Shell, GDF Suez and Siemens, lobbied for and won carbon capture credits for new coal plants, even though carbon offsets for dirty coal are known to be ineffective at reducing emissions.

Untangling industry’s involvement in global climate negotiations will require taking on some of the biggest trade groups in the world. Members of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, for example, have combined annual revenue of more than $7 trillion and include Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Shell, Duke Energy and BP. While the council presents its 200 corporate members “as part of the solution to climate change,” it has consistently lobbied against legally binding standards at every major United Nations environmental summit since the council was founded in 1992. And the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which has been granted privileged access at the United Nations, has “consistently blocked attempts at regulating emissions,” according to the Corporate Europe Observatory (PDF). Unsurprisingly, the ICC’s members consist of the world’s biggest polluters, including Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil and Duke Energy.

The European Parliament, at least, has recognized the need to rein in such industry influence. In a resolution presented on the eve of the 2013 climate talks, it called for vigilance “concerning efforts by economic actors that emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases or benefit from burning fossil fuels to undermine or subvert climate protection efforts.”

After last year’s climate talks, 78 organizations from around the world penned an open letter to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, calling on them to “to protect climate policymaking from the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry.” Ban has announced he will be joining climate marchers in the street. Here’s hoping he also listens to the call to action. As sea levels rise and millions are displaced, as species disappear and extreme weather sweeps the globe, it’s ever more clear we need an Article 5.3 for climate talks — and we need it now.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Spielvogel/Wikimedia

The post What Climate Activists Can Learn From the Fight Against Big Tobacco appeared first on Real Food Media.

This past weekend, biotech giant Monsanto paid bloggers $150 each to attend “an intimate and interactive panel” with “two female farmers and a team from Monsanto.” The strictly invitation-only three-hour brunch, which took place on the heels of the BlogHer Conference, promised bloggers a chance to learn about “where your food comes from” and to hear about the “impact growing food has on the environment, and how farmers are using fewer resources to feed a growing population.” Though the invitation from BlogHer explicitly stated, “No blog posts or social media posts expected,” the event was clearly designed to influence the opinions — and the writing — of a key influencer: the mommy blogger. Another invite-only event in August will bring bloggers to a Monsanto facility in Northern California for a tour of its fields and research labs. Again, while no media coverage is expected, the unspoken goal is clear.

Stealth marketing techniques, such as these by Monsanto, reveal how the food industry — from biotech behemoths to fast-food peddlers — is working surreptitiously to shape public opinion about biotechnology, industrialized farming and junk food.

We’ve come a long way from Don Draper’s whisky-infused ad concepts meant for old-style print publications. As our media landscape has changed, Big Ag has changed along with it, devising marketing to take advantage of this new terrain and influence the people and platforms — not just journalists and newspapers — that shape our understanding of farming and the health impacts of biotechnology and junk food.

Sean Timberlake, who has been blogging for nearly a decade, characterized industry’s move into the social media space as “sweeping and vast.” He explained that back when he started out, “I don’t think the Monsantos of the world understood what blogs were — or cared,” but now, “companies develop entire budget lines for social media programs. They build it into their whole ad budget.” Ad networks such as BlogHer and Federated — two of the biggest — facilitate companies’ advertising and outreach on blogs by aggregating blogs to sell as a bigger package. These networks, Timberlake explained, “can be leveraged and used as a bullhorn for their marketing.”

Sure, PR is an old game, but Big Ag is giving the age-old techniques of shaping public opinion a new, sneakier spin. Much of today’s marketing happens behind the scenes and off the printed page — on the Web pages of blogs, on Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, through sponsored content and industry-funded webisodes and on the stages of big-ideas festivals.

Monsanto is not the only food company engaging with the blogosphere. Mommy bloggers are the food industry’s newest nontraditional ally. McDonald’s has been wooing them aggressively too, offering sweepstakes in partnership with BlogHer for the company’s Listening Tour Luncheon, an exclusive event with the head of McDonald’s USA — framed as a two-way conversation about nutrition, but more likely a gambit to garner the support of a powerful group of influencers. And in Canada, McDonald’s offers All-Access Mom, behind-the-scenes tours of the company’s inner workings.

It’s not just through blogger meet-and-greets that industry is attempting to sway opinion. Video is an increasingly popular (and shareable) medium for PR disguised as content. This summer, for example, Monsanto is funding a Condé Nast Media Group film series called “A Seat at the Table.” According to a casting call, each three- to five-minute episode will cover questions such as “Are food labels too complicated?” and “GMOs: good or bad?” and will feature “an eclectic mix of industry and nonindustry notables with diverse viewpoints.” It’s hard to imagine truly free-flowing discussions resulting, paid for as they are by a company with a definitive take on — and stake in — the food-labeling wars. The U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, meanwhile, funded the documentary “Farmland,” described as a “look at the lives of farmers and ranchers,” but whose narrative — as critics have been quick to point out — “glorif[ies] the trend toward larger, more industrialized farms.” No surprise, given that the film’s financing comes from an agribusiness front group.

Big Ag is putting its communications dollars toward big-ideas events too, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, where underwriters such as Monsanto are celebrated — and get a voice. Monsanto executives got to share their opinions onstage about GMO labeling (surprise: they’re not in favor of state-based labeling initiatives) and how best to feed the world (again: their chemicals and genetically engineered seeds are key to combating hunger). And past years have seen Coca-Cola, DuPont and Syngenta executives all touting their companies’ sustainability onstage.

The uptick in these stealth-marketing strategies coincides with growing popular outcry about agricultural chemicals, soda and junk food and genetically modified ingredients. Consider that despite millions spent on marketing over the two decades since genetically engineered seeds were first commercialized, 93 percent of Americans still think GMOs should be labeled and 65 percent are either unsure about the technology or believe it to be unsafe. Last year, when Monsanto retained the PR firm FleishmanHillard, known for its work with social media and agribusiness, to develop its new marketing initiatives, it did so “amid fierce opposition to the seed giant’s genetically modified products,” noted the Holmes Report, a PR industry publication.

The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, might never have dreamed up the age of Twitter and Facebook, but he likely wouldn’t be surprised to see food-industry tweets and Facebook ads dressed up as news. Bernays knew the importance of constant PR innovation. If the public “becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it,” he wrote in his 1928 book “Propaganda,” then we must simply present our “appeals more intelligently.” Or, as we’re seeing with Monsanto and its food industry counterparts, if not exactly intelligently, then at least more surreptitiously: on the podium, the Twitter feeds and the mommy blogs.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for McDonald’s via Al Jazeera America

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