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By Jeanette Drake
Published on Wednesday, Jan 30, 2008
KENT: Whatcha got in your milk?
Your guess will be as good as mine if the Ohio Agriculture Department has its way. Motivated by Monsanto, the multinational agricultural biotech corporation, state farm officials are considering regulations that would restrict what dairies can say about the milk they produce. Prohibiting dairies from giving consumers full information is laughable.
Proponents want to prevent dairies from telling consumers that their milk does not come from cows injected with the highly controversial, genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone. That's a mouthful, but stay with me. This synthetic hormone, rBGH, is manufactured by . . . you guessed it . . . Monsanto.
What's more, the government's so-called advisory committee is stacked with dairy producers who use rBGH, and the ''consumer representative'' is a woman who used to work for Monsanto.
Consumers have a right to know what's in food, where it comes from and how it was produced. Producers have the right and the responsibility to tell us. Regulations that suppress this information would allow anyone, in essence, to slip in rBGH while we're not looking. The state would be an accomplice — stripping Ohioans of our right to know.
American, Canadian and European Union scientists have questioned the safety of rBGH, especially in increasing the risks of cancer and antibiotic resistance in humans. The main, U.N. food-safety body twice decided it could not endorse the safety of the synthetic hormone for human health. In addition, Canada and the European Union have banned it officially on animal welfare grounds.
Nevertheless, the issue on the table right now isn't what we put in our mouths, but what comes out of them.
Barack Obama was right when he said in a recent debate, ''Words matter.'' How we frame or present an issue is as important as the issue itself.
And the greatest framing power of all is the power to keep an issue out of the news, out of public discourse and, in this case, out of food labels. In fact, millions of dollars have been spent to keep rBGH (aka rbST) out of sight, out of mind.
Milking lawmakers and government agencies is at issue here. According to Open Secrets, the Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics, Monsanto spent more than $3.6 million for lobbying in 2006. Against a PR machine on steroids, public well-being is at serious risk.
Proponents' motivations are transparent, but milk is not, so it's essential that consumers be given the facts about what they're drinking.
There is a well-known saying that the best PR is invisible. I disagree. As a professor of public relations, I try to teach students ethical standards, but far too many real-world cases, like this one, undercut those efforts. The invisible albeit powerful PR forces behind this push suggest a public-be-scammed mentality that relies on subterfuge and worse.
When it comes to the food we eat and the milk we serve our families, preventing full disclosure flies in the face of the free market, democratic principles and common sense. My father, who was a dairy farmer, never would have supported such dishonesty. Neither does the Public Relations Society of America condone actions that short-circuit the democratic process and the free flow of information.
The fact is, Americans in growing number are choosing not to buy milk that comes from cows injected with rBGH. The movement is so big that many large organizations, such as Starbucks and Kroger, have announced plans to stop using or selling such milk. In turn, this is motivating the biotech corporation to do an end-run around the consumer — making a mockery of honest, two-way communication that PR professionals espouse.
When this ludicrous labeling restriction proposal failed at the federal level, proponents adopted the strategy to divide and conquer state by state. The strategy targeted Pennsylvanians and Ohioans for being gullible enough to swallow it first.
It almost worked in Pennsylvania. In October, the state said no more ''absence labeling'' on milk. Turns out our neighbors to the east do want to know what they're drinking. A public outcry forced the state to back down and reverse its decision just this month, proving that Monsanto can buy slick ad campaigns and political influence till the cows come home, but, by and large, U.S. consumers (like those in Europe and Canada) do not want the corporation's genetically engineered, bovine growth hormone near their milk.
At the very least, we have the right to know whether it's there.
KENT: Whatcha got in your milk?
Get the full article here.
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