Debunking another big lie from Big Ag

(From Wood Prairie Farm's newsletter)

Buying Influence.
Biotech's war of disinformation heats up.

Prop 37: Biotech and the Stanford Sell Out.

Early this week all the telltale signs were there. Biotech's $25 million massively funded propaganda campaign of disinformation - orchestrated by former tobacco lobbyists - aimed at confusing California voters into voting against their own interests: CA Prop 37, the peoples' Right-To-Know GMO Labeling referendum.

Then, a coordinated, national tsunami-like blanket coverage of suffocating proportions by the traditional media - down to the smallest hamlet including our local country radio station - of a 'new' Stanford compilation study which at once trashed organic, ignored biotech crops and held a no-questions-asked-assumption that the government's chemical-industry-friendly official pesticide tolerance levels were somehow scientifically-based and bulls eye accurate. The subject: under the lens of a narrow 'nutritional comparison,' a calculated unwieldy meta-analysis of 17 human studies and 223 laboratory studies of how does organic compare to conventional.

Within twenty four hours, the cracks in the processional's armor started to appear.

Noted Activist Post: "From Stanford Center for Health Policy's own website it is admitted that 'national' and international foundations and corporations' fund its research and 'outreach activities.' This confirms the suspicions of an increasingly aware public who saw the 'study' as biased, contradictory of both logic and ethics, and the result of insidious corporate-funding.

According to FSI's 2011 Annual Report Agricultural giant Cargill, British Petroleum (BP), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Goldman Sachs, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and many other corporate-financier, Fortune 500 special interests."

Agricultural giant Cargill is in fact in direct partnership with Stanford University. Specifically it has donated at least 5 million dollars for the creation of a Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). The center is allegedly 'committed to helping feed a growing population while preserving the planet's natural resources.' This will presumably be done through the use of patented Cargill biotechnology, have nothing to do with actually 'helping feed' anything but Cargill's bottom line and corporate-financier domination of the global food supply, while Stanford simply leverages its reputation and credibility to give cover and badly needed legitimacy to Cargill's methods and agenda. Stanford's most recent "study" is essentially the university "giving back" to Cargill and others."

Two lessons come to mind which are pertinent to this Stanford news story.

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt: "in politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
   
   
2. Mythically attributed to Watergate's Deep Throat: "Follow the money."

It is no coincidence that the corporations behind this propaganda coup are the biggest contributors to the biotech disinformation campaign deployed to defeat California Prop 37.

Below are links to some of the more pithy articles exposing the false 'journalism' and study critiques which expose Stanford's embarrassing complicity.

Jim

• 5 Ways the Stanford Study Sells Organic Short.
• Cargill and Others Behind anti-Organic "Stanford Study."
• Why the News is Wrong: We Need to Eat Organic.
• Fruit and Soil Quality of Organic and Conventional Strawberry Agrosystems.