June 2001
In the aisles of the giant supermarket Loblaws, between bottles of President’s Choice Memories of Kobe sauce and Memories of Singapore noodles, there is a new in-store special: blacked-out labels on organic foods. These boxes used to say “Free of genetically modified organisms,” but then Canada’s largest grocery chain decreed that such labels were no longer permitted.
At first glance, its decision doesn’t seem to make market sense. When the first Frankenfood protests came to Europe, chains such as Tesco and Safeway scrambled to satisfy consumer demand by labelling their own lines GMO-free. And when Loblaws entered the health food market with its line of President’s Choice Organics, it seemed to be going the same route. In ads, the company proudly pointed out that certified organic products “must be free of genetically modified organisms.”
Then the about-face, made public last week: not only will Loblaws not make the GMO-free claim on its own packages, it won’t allow anyone else to make the claim. Company executives say there is just no way of knowing what’s genuinely GMO-free—apparently it’s too confusing.
More than 90 percent of Canadians tell pollsters they want labels indicating if their food’s genetic makeup has been tampered with, but Galen Weston, chairman of Loblaw Companies, has publicly warned that “there will be a cost associated” with such an initiative. This, in part, explains the obliterating magic markers: if Loblaws carries organic products labelled GMO-free, it’s harder to explain why the firm isn’t informing consumers when food does contain genetically modified ingredients, as is the case for roughly 70 percent of Canadian foods. So the grocer has made a rather brutal choice: rather than give consumers some of the information they are demanding, it will provide none of it.
And this is only one salvo in a war being waged by the agribusiness industry on consumer choice in the genetic engineering debate—not just in Canada but potentially around the world. Faced with thirty-five countries that have developed, or are developing, mandatory GM labelling laws, the industry seems to be doing everything it can to make those European and Asian labels as obsolete as the ones that have been scratched out at Loblaws. How? By polluting faster than countries can legislate.
For example, one of the companies forced to remove its labels is Nature’s Path, an organic food firm based in Delta, British Columbia. Earlier this month, company president Arran Stephens told The New York Times that GM material is indeed finding its way into organic crops. “We have found traces in corn that has been grown organically for ten to fifteen years. There’s no wall high enough to keep that stuff contained.”
Some organic food companies are considering suing the biotech industry for contamination, but the law is going in the opposite direction. Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser was sued by Monsanto after its patented genetically altered canola seeds blew into the farmer’s field from passing trucks and neighbouring fields. Monsanto says that when the airborne seeds took root, Schmeiser was stealing its property. The court agreed and, two months ago, ordered the farmer to pay the company $20,000, plus legal costs.
The most well-known contamination case is StarLink corn. After the genetically altered crop (meant for animals and deemed unfit for humans) made its way into the food supply, Aventis, which owns the patent, proposed a solution: instead of recalling the corn, why not approve its consumption for humans? In other words, change the law to fit the contamination.
Around the world, consumers are exercising a renewed political power, demanding organic options at the supermarket and asking their governments for clear labelling of GM foods. Yet all the while, the agribusiness giants—backed by predatory intellectual property laws—are getting the global food supply so hopelessly cross-pollinated, contaminated, polluted and mixed up that legislators may well be forced to throw up their hands. As biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin says, “They’re hoping there’s enough contamination so that it’s a fait accompli.”
When we look back on this moment, munching our genetically modified Natural Values™ health-style food, our human-approved StarLink tacos and our mutated, farmed Atlantic salmon, we may well remember it as the precise point when we lost our real food options. Perhaps Loblaws will even launch a new product to bottle that wistful feeling: Memories of Consumer Choice.