Here to kick off the annual GMO Awareness Week is Ronnie Cummins, founder of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA). February 4th was the 22nd anniversary of the introduction of genetically engineered (GE) foods into the U.S. food system.

Twenty-two years ago, on February 4th, Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone (BGH) was forced onto the market despite complaints from consumers and scientists warning that this technology is inherently dangerous.

“Despite the fact that consumers said they wanted labeling and independent safety testing, they just rammed it on through,” Ronnie says.

“Here we are, 22 years later, [and] a large percentage of our farmlands and our foods in the United States now contain genetically engineered or genetically modified ingredients — 75 percent of all supermarket foods.

We’ve had an interesting 20-year battle with consumers asserting their right to know; their right to choose.”

If Lying Were Illegal, We’d Have GMO Labeling Already

It really heated up in 2012 when OCA, Dr. Bronner’s and I, and a number of other allies began putting GMO labeling initiatives on state ballots. California was the first, followed by Washington in 2013 and Oregon in 2014.

We came very close to winning all those state ballots, despite food and biotech companies outspending us many times over, pouring tens of millions of dollars into their anti-labeling campaigns.

Had lying to voters1 been illegal during those campaigns, there’s little doubt we’d have won. During the 2012 campaign, the industry was caught misrepresenting academic affiliations, misusing federal seal of the FDA, and falsely quoting the agency in a mailer sent to voters.

The attorney general in Washington State also indicted the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) for carrying out an illegal money-laundering scheme to protect the identity of members who donated funds to the opposing campaign in 2013.

As explained by Ronnie:

“The Big Food companies had become so worried about consumer backlash by 2013 that they no longer were willing to go public with their donations to stop GMO labeling.

They set up a front group and laundered the money illegally and they got caught. Hopefully, they’re going to have to pay millions and millions of dollars in penalties.

But the thing they really hate the most is that we beat them in the court of public opinion. We educated a critical mass of American consumers about the hazards of GMOs and the chemical toxins — the pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides — that always accompany them.

We’ve alerted the public to the dangers of GMO-derived foods, and the public have stood up and even the corporate media and the indentured politicians in Washington have had to listen.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIykkMdMbIU