2.GM feeds world? Don't fall for spin – Elisabeth Winkler
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1.Pefect storm of media spin

 

If anyone doubts that a deliberate and carefully coordinated campaign is underway to promote GM, they need only look to the material popping up in the UK media this week.

 

Exhibit 1 is yesterday's print supplement in The Guardian titled "Agriculture". It was placed and produced by the Lyonsdown media group, who specialise in producing "informative and engaging special interest supplements... geared to the respective publication's readership."
http://www.lyonsdown.co.uk/how_we_work.php

 

Lyonsdown don't say which of their corporate clients they produced the Guardian supplement for, but with its focus on Africa, and content from the UK's pro-GM Environment Minister Hilary Benn, Dominic Dyer of the Crop Protection Association (read pesticide lobby), and Derek Burke – the "Godfather" of the UK's GM lobby, it's not exactly hard to figure.
http://ngin.tripod.com/articleBurke.htm

 

On the same day that Dyer of the CPA was appearing in the Guardian's "special interest" supplement, he was also given a showcase for his views by BBC News. In his "Viewpoint" piece on how "False fears threaten food supplies", Dyer not only defends pesticides but promotes GMOs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8218364.stm

 

Dyer's pitch is that with a coming food crisis we cannot afford to restrict pesticides and if we do then the only way we'll survive will be thanks to GMOs! Given that the pesticide manufacturers that constitute the CPA's biggest members are also GM firms – this is a perfect "Heads we win, tails you lose" line of argument.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8218364.stm

 

Meanwhile, the current issue of the food industry publication, the Fresh Produce Journal, which targets retailers, food service companies, importers, wholesalers and producers, has a special feature on "The great GM debate" authored by Bayer's Julian Little. 

 

Little, of course, isn't actually billed as a Bayer employee but as the Chairman of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC). It doesn't say that the ABC is a PR front in the UK for the major biotech corporations. It's run by PR firm Lexington Communications, who also run the GM lobby group CropGen, and have very close ties to New Labour.
http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Lexington_Communications

 

Little's article is a quality compilation of carefully crafted spin – "The use of GM technology in agriculture has been an astonishing success", "there is no silver bullet, no quick fix and no magic wand but it can play a key role in helping to stabilise global food supplies". It attacks the EU's "dysfunctional regulatory system" while blaming concern about GM on public ignorance. It promotes GM to the food industry in terms of growers, producers and consumers all deserving to have the GM choice.
http://greenbio.checkbiotech.org/news/great_gm_debate

 

Also yesterday, BBC News ran a piece on researchers at Rothamsted, the avidly pro-GM agricultural research institute, quoting Professor Keith Goulding saying, "it's frustrating that GM is not more acceptable." This BBC piece is actually quite enlightening on part of the PR plan for making GM "more acceptable". Under the title, "Averting a perfect storm of shortages", the BBC's environment correspondent, David Shukman notes in his piece, "The warning of a 'perfect storm' is partly intended to focus attention on the positive role that science can play – and to galvanise politicians to support it."

 

In fact, pro-GM lobbyists have for some time been seizing on both the recent food crisis and concerns over the agricultural impact of the climate crisis to promote GM as an urgent necessity both in Europe and the developing world.
 
In Europe, farmers' concerns over the cost and availability of animal feed, first triggered by the "biofuels" boom, have also been used to put pressure on the institutions and governments of the EU to speed up GM crop approvals and weaken safeguards, eg on thresholds for tolerance of unapproved GMOs that may contaminate grain shipments. At the same time, within the UK, there has also been a coordinated campaign to use reports coming out of the Government's departments for food and the environment (DEFRA) and international development (DfID), as well as ones due from the Royal Society and Foresight, amongst others, to promote GM crops and secure greater political and media acceptance, plus of course new funding for GM crop development.

 

To date, the media has largely been drawn in to this spin campaign uncritically, with an almost complete failure to look beyond the "perfect storm" rhetoric in order to examine the actual facts on GM crop development, and how this technology compares in terms of productivity and economic value, never mind safety, with the alternatives.

 

As Doug Gurian-Sherman has noted, while public plant and animal breeders are working in relative obscurity, their programmes are also losing critical support and funding as attention and resources are diverted to high cost and less productive GM approaches.
http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11350:boost-funding-for-public-good-plant-breeding
http://tiny.cc/VcC1W
See also: http://www.bangmfood.org/feed-the-world/17-feeding-the-world/14-non-gm-breakthroughs

An outcome that can only be exacerbated by the perfect storm of media spin.
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2.GM feeds world? Don't fall for spin
Elisabeth Winkler
Real Food Lover, August 26 2009
http://realfoodlover.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/gm-feeds-world-dont-fall-for-spin/

 

Did you see yesterday's print supplement to the Guardian?

 

Titled Agriculture, produced by the Lyonsdown media group, it was basically a huge advert for intensive farming.

 

Including promoting the use of GM crops in Africa.

 

Warning! Spin-alert!

 

Don't fall for the propoganda even if (indeed especially if) it comes with a nice liberal paper like the Guardian.

 

It is a blatant calculation to appeal to caring Guardian-reader types.

 

What makes me so cross is that Africa is used in the sales talk.

 

For goodness sake, let us get one thing straight.

 

There is NO GM crop being grown commercially that improves yield. The only ones being grown are designed to make intensive farming easier.

 

Currently, GM plants are engineered to be resistent to pesticide-spraying.  A farm can spray a whole GM crop with a pesticide and the GM plants don’t die.

 

How this is supposed to help a farmer in Africa?

 

All it does is increase dependency on agrichemical companies. The farmers have to buy the GM seed (which cannot be saved) AND the pesticides to go with it, and the licence to use it all.

 

One of the authors in the supplement was Professor Derek Burke who was on the government's advisory committee for novel foods and processes.

 

He writes how organic farmers are a "wealthy lobby group" preventing GM progress.

 

See pic above for evidence of this so-called "wealthy lobby group."

 

Am I supposed to believe that a section representing 2% 0f the UK food industry, and is made up of mainly small family farms, is the only thing in the way of GM world domination?

 

No mention of the European public which does not want GM.

 

No mention of the African farmers who do not want GM.

 

And strangely, no mention of the marketing budget of  agrichemical corporations such as Monsanto and Bayer which are pushing their risky, unproven GM technology.

 

I wonder what the PR spend is on a supplement such as the one in the Guardian?

 

I don't think a multinational GM company is short of a bob or two for its PR war.