GEO Watch | Consumer Education Monsanto-Style
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Internet troll. Credit: Splitreason. |
World Food Prize winner outlines shift in strategy
FOCUS ON CONSUMERS NOT JUST GROWERS
Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | May 2,
2014
Robert Fraley, Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer
and this year’s winner of the dubious World Food Prize, recently admitted that
Monsanto made a huge strategic error by focusing educational outreach on growers and ignoring consumers. An interesting analysis of this admission is presented in an overlooked report by Joan
Faus published in the April
12, 2014 edition of El
País (Spain). Faus quotes Fraley admitting the error: “In the last twenty years
almost all of our communication activities and education have been focused on
farmers and it went very well. But the mistake we made is that we did not put
enough effort toward consumer education.”
Faus attended a press conference hosted last
month by Fraley in St. Louis with invited members of the European press corps. The
extended session revealed much about the political and strategic worldview of Monsanto’s top technologist and
legitimation agent-in-chief. According to Faus, Fraley’s view of consumer
education is informed by the corporation’s awareness that the future of
genetically modified foods will be largely played out in the public sphere and
not the science labs. We should note that scientists have always been
imbricated with the political machinery of the state as the overlapping industry
ties of past and current USDA and FDA appointees will attest.
Perhaps, but one thing is certain: Monsanto does seem
acutely aware that the battle between supporters and opponents of GM has heated
up and is extremely fierce. Moreover, after years of accumulating what Fraley
views as an unfairly bad reputation, the Gene Giant has decided to change
strategy: It plans to get closer to the
consumer so it can work at convincing skeptics and critics of the safety of
its products and the positive effects biotechnology presumably has on world
agriculture [sic].
Monsanto admits it has a growing “credibility crisis”
among consumers worldwide but it is playing an old discursive trick,
asserting that this is not a problem of risk but of risk communication. According
to Faus’s report, Monsanto’s lack of credibility is more complicated as illustrated
by consumer rankings for “Most Evil Corporation of the Year.”
While clearly not based on a rigorous scientific sample of consumers, the results of a survey
of 16,000 respondents conducted online by Natural News
revealed that more than half of these respondents (51%) identified Monsanto as Most
Evil Corporation of 2011. These results accurately
reflect how anti-GMO consumers rank corporations and by extension are also reliable
indicators of emerging attitudinal trends across all the consumer groups
Monsanto wishes to “educate”. Monsanto likely realizes this is more than a
problem of risk communication and is instead more a question of taking control
of risk characterization to
manipulate and create confusion and hence inaction among the broadest consumer
market segments possible. Doublethink style, education is obfuscation.
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No come el maíz violado. Don’t eat violated corn. |
Do these opinion surveys reveal anything unique or
useful about the nature of the discursive politics surrounding Monsanto’s
transgenic crops specifically and biotechnology in general? Monsanto would have
you believe that people opposed to GMOs are irrational and basing their choices
on pure fear. Is this presumption of irrationality justified? Not really since
the scientific evidence against GMOs is fast mounting, but this is the wrong
question posed by too many pundits. More important is what this tells us about Monsanto’s
efforts to reframe the public discourse that has ascribed to the brand such a nasty,
super-loaded or ‘monkey’ signifier in the form of its nefarious status as the
world’s “Most Evil Corporation”.
A significant dimension of a critical
deconstructive approach suggests serious study of something Faus hints
at: Monsanto is, of course, already
hiring PR experts who do the sort of hermeneutic and semiotic quant analysis
made part of pop culture by Don Draper and his underlings in Mad Men. The artist [sic] in the age of digital
reproduction becomes an information manager who is best when s/he recognize how
to manipulate language and other symbolic discursive games, especially through what we might term systematically-distorted communication. Presumably it then becomes a simple matter of activating mass media discourse agents to define
and constrain truth claims and the qualification of those deemed able to make objective truth claims by virtue of a particular (reductionist) way of knowing the world.
Despite all this Monsanto’s basic problem will fortunately always be driven by the unavoidable
fact that the most enduring controversies go well beyond a simplistic focus
on consumer food safety. Our critiques are formidable and play across an
evolving set of perceptions covering the entire range of economic, environmental,
cultural, and public health effects associated with all of the stacked-traits
GMO product lines and their ancillaries. The challenges
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This is what Monsanto neo-regulation is attacking. It seems unAmerican to a growing number of stakeholders Image source: Sustainingstarter. |
Risk scientists, consumers, seed savers, plant
breeders, organics farmers, environmental and nutrition health advocates, among
many other members of the public who are direct stakeholders in the food system
agree that the problem is the miscommunication about existing risks across the entire spectrum of integrated biotechnology products including the vast inventories of, as well as in-the-pipeline, agro-industrial chemicals like the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers required under the seed licensing and
precision-farming contracts the Gene Giants impose on most producers. We agree that the scientific evidence already points at problems
in the form of interrelated social, cultural, economic, and environmental
disparate impacts. As a result, Monsanto
is having a hard time disputing the hardening evidence that transgenics has a major environmental justice problem.
But this is more than about the politics of the communication and perception of risk. Faus
notes that consumer “repulsion generated by Monsanto practices” was expressed across the world in May 2013 with demonstrations in 436 cities in 52
countries. Monsanto clearly has a European problem, but what about the USA or Latin America? Social
movements clearly complicate the public discourse process in all these settings.
Not to be overlooked are the politics of interlocking
relationships that have persisted among governmental and biotech industry elites
ever since Michael Taylor at the FDA and later with Monsanto first got the Bush
I administration to embrace the nefarious and unscientific principle of substantial equivalence; for one of the best discussions of this concept, see Ho and Steinbrecher 1998. This occurred, as seems very much to still be the case today, over the
objections of many of the FDA’s own scientists and legal advisors. The Obama
Administration has followed the Bush and Clinton neoliberal policies that expanded
Monsanto’s role as fox in charge of safety in the henhouse.
In the wake of this ability to control federal
executive administrative rulemaking, Monsanto has perhaps felt compelled and
empowered to co-opt as much of American regulatory institutions and apparatuses
and does so amid polls (Kopicki
2013) that consistently indicate at least 75 percent (three-fourths) of US
consumers express concern with the presence of GMOs in their food with the
majority citing fear of adverse health effects. It is this ‘fear’ factor that Monsanto is
utilizing to undermine all critics,
an issue I will explore in greater depth in another post.
The legitimation crisis facing transgenic
technologies and GMO foods has apparently led Monsanto to start rethinking
corporate PR strategy. Faus’s notes have Fraley stating that: “Consumers [must] see us as
the first step in the food chain and they want to hear more about us...We
must do better” [brackets added]; also see Fraley interview with Agriculture.com. Faus observes how Monsanto has “stepped
up its communication on social networks where opponents are very strong”. It
has also provided several pages with more consumer-oriented ‘food-safety’
information on the company’s website – go to Monsanto Food
Safety.
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Anatomy of an Internet troll. Image credit: Frankniceleyfiles. |
One of my sources in the Midwest confirms that Monsanto
has some company staff doubling as Internet Trolls –
persons who stalk and harass the targets of misinformation campaigns and like
agent provocateurs disrupt or interfere with public discourse. The ultimate aim
of trolling is to create a hostile language environment that often drives many people
out of the non-GMO social networks, creating a false air of scientific
uncertainty and controversy or the reframing of expressions of fear as an
unnecessary and Voodoo-like threat to the science of food security.
You can always tell what kind of crisis a corporation
thinks it faces by the measure of activity and increased revenue spent on PR
and advertising. Monsanto is obviously reaching deeper into its bottomless
pockets with a new generous round of spending on so-called consumer education.
Faus reports that in late 2013 Monsanto expanded its relationship with Fleishman Hillard, a leading public
relations firm and division of the Omnicom
Group.
Omnicom, with a market cap of $17.307 billion, is
itself one of a triad of the largest advertising and pubic relations firms in
the world today with massive global reach. Faus reports the F&H division
maintains 80 offices in 29 countries with affiliates in 42 additional countries.
This will be Monsanto’s global slayer of activists and dissidents and central truth
fabrication machine deployed to win the hearts and minds of global consumers,
its newfangled object of desire.
Of course, F&H will have its hands more than full
developing and coordinating any new global campaign designed to address the
‘brand’ as if managing the image is all it takes. Good luck with that. Colin
O’Neil of the Center for Food Safety is quoted by Faus: “At the same time,
[Monsanto] is spending millions to fight the right of consumers to know, so no
matter how well-intentioned it is to refresh the brand, consumers find this
suspicious.”
Monsanto’s status as the world’s most evil
corporation is the target image requiring a ‘makeover’ and a Monsanto
spokeswoman speaking with Faus confirmed the company is a client of F&H agency.
Faus suggests this may have something to do with Monsanto’s retreat from the EU
and subsequent re-positioning to build on an already substantial presence in
Latin America with soy and GM maize (in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile). Last
September, the agency promoted an ad campaign along with other big biotech
groups that included several websites offering detailed consumer information on
these foods for a Latin American audience. Monsanto now offers its own page
under the rubric of FAQs – go to Preguntas
más frecuentes.
Faus details how anti-GMO activists believe Monsanto’s
new spin as a more “conciliatory” and “transparent” partner of consumers and
farmers that is dedicated to combatting world hunger is false and indicates a
heightened level of corporate nervousness. Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association is
quoted: “It has been realized that genetics is over. The public will not accept
an unpredictable and dangerous technology.”
Activists recall that 93% of US consumers support
labeling and in remember that in 2007 Barack Obama as primary candidate made
a promise to that effect. There is always a political context for this type
of unprincipled betrayal and in this case the smoking gun, or bureaucrat, is
none other than Michael Taylor, the very same Clinton appointee who worked in
the FDA when the substantial equivalence decision was forged, then passed on to
Monsanto where he was a vice-president, and is now back at the FDA. That is the
nature of the structural control Monsanto has over the executive branch
agencies, and we are not even addressing the millions spent on lobbyists.
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Faus’s fascinating report reminds me of that Tolstoy
adage about how best to remedy a bad reputation? You don’t sully it to begin
with. Meanwhile, Fraley laments the sorry state of things to as many reporters
as will listen, yet always feigning naiveté: “I cannot really explain [this]
vilification,” reluctantly admitting Monsanto’s dark past as the producer of the
Agent Orange used in the U.S. war in Viet Nam. “Undoubtedly the legacy of the
past is a challenge for any company [and this matter of] public acceptance” can
affect sales.
The science of actuating the bottom-line will be
based on bamboozling the consumer with the pretense of a heroic and
conciliatory white knight riding in on elegant transgenic horseback, armed with
glyphosate shields and RNAi swords, to feed the needy and hungry while
protecting the Earth from overpopulating brown hordes and the mean-spirited
activists who abuse free speech rights to interfere with science and its presumably natural
result of human progress. Has the banality of evil ever been more pretentiously
humanistic?
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