FDA to use millions in taxpayer dollars to promote GMO propaganda
05/23/2017 / By Isabelle Z.
You might not be willing to buy GMO foods, but you’ll still be spending money on them thanks to a new congressional bill that allocates $3 million of taxpayer dollars to “consumer outreach and education regarding agricultural biotechnology.”
A Pew study recently discovered that 39 percent of people in the U.S. think GMOs are bad for your health, and now the FDA – and those who line its pockets – want to rid the American public of this very inconvenient belief. Organic food is growing in popularity, and this is making them increasingly nervous.
More than 65 food and agriculture groups sent a letter to congressional leaders pushing them to add support for agricultural bioscience in this budget, and it was probably hard for them to say no when you consider the fact that Big Ag interests have donated more than $26 million to political campaigns, including congressmen who are on the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee. Subcommittee Chair Representative Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.), for example, was given $10,000 by Monsanto last year.
The letter says the campaign is necessary because of all the “misinformation” that is floating around about the topic. Big Ag sure knows a lot about misinformation. In fact, firms like Monsanto are experts at getting their own pro-GMO message out to the public, even going so far as to enlist a team of internet trolls whose sole purpose is to find anyone who posts negative comments about pesticides like Roundup and GMOs online and attack them. They even have a name for this effort – “let nothing go” – and they’re targeting everything from widely-read news articles to people’s comments on Facebook.
The FDA is not an educational body. Its purpose is regulating the safety of our nation’s food and medical devices. It’s already failing miserably at what it was originally set up to do, and now it’s taking on additional tasks?
What science will form the basis of this educational campaign?
While the specifics of the campaign have not been revealed, it’s hard not to roll your eyes at the mention of the “science-based educational information” that will be used as part of the propaganda. Most Natural News readers know by now where GMO firms like Monsanto get their science: They skew, exaggerate, threaten, or invent it outright and have real scientists sign off on it, as court documents have revealed in a lawsuit against Monsanto that was filed by people who have developed cancer as a result of exposure to its “safe” Roundup herbicide.
Let’s just pretend for a minute that GMOs are somehow safe to consume after all. There are still plenty of problems with them. For example, soy farmers who plant GM crops are known to use 28 percent more herbicide than those that do not. Their argument that genetic modification improves crop yields is also full of holes, with a New York Times investigation revealing that the practice has not increased crop yields, nor has it reduced chemical pesticide use.
While it’s outrageous to think that our taxpayer dollars are being used to promote something that the World Health Organization has labeled a probable carcinogen, the misuse of public funds is nothing new in our country. The government has used our tax dollars to promote genetically modified food crops overseas in the past and essentially pressure foreign governments to relax biotech crop oversight. We already pay for Planned Parenthood to abort babies and sell their organs for profit. Now, it seems we get to pay for the promotion of harmful chemicals that can possibly kill adults, too.
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Tagged Under: FDA, GMOs, propaganda
