Election 2014: Oregon Ballot Measure 92

Oregon Ballot Measure 92, which we’re voting on this week, requires that raw and packaged foods produced entirely or partly by “genetic engineering” be labeled as such. It would apply to retailers, suppliers, and manufacturers, and take effect in January 2016.

Television ads for and against the proposal have followed hard on each other’s heels every night for the past few weeks, and the issue could involve the heaviest spending in this campaign. Despite all the fuss, the question posed by Measure 92 is the simplest on this year’s ballot.

All it comes down to is this: Would you prefer to know what goes into your food? Very simple question, very simple answer: Most of us like to know what we’re eating.

So I’m voting yes.

But it’s been amusing to see the arguments the opposition has thrown up, so to speak, in an attempt to make the matter seem more complicated than it is. Most of them are various “cost,” “fairness,” and “more government regulation” objections that evade the main point of whether the move is desirable.

In fact, if you look at them hard, most of the arguments in opposition offer additional reasons to vote yes. For example, the ads are telling Oregon voters:

It would raise food costs

It might. But that doesn’t mean people won’t appreciate the information and pay for it. “Rising cost” has been the perennial complaint that corporations have thrown at every proposal that would be good for people, such as adding seat belts to cars in the 1960s.

Did that add to their cost? Probably. Was it worth it? Hell, yes.

It exempts too many food items

Whether it does or not, this seems like a particularly weak reason to oppose a start in the right direction. The argument implies that GMO labeling is the right thing to do; it just doesn’t go far enough, so it’s “unfair.”

If it’s really true, we can fix that in the future, just as we’ve fixed the civil rights legislation of the mid 1960s several times over subsequent decades to apply to women, disabled persons, and gays and lesbians. So why is this an argument in opposition?

It creates two standards across the nation: GMO labeling inside Oregon, no labeling outside the state

Again, this dodges the question of whether it would be a positive thing to do. The Oregon Retail Council’s argument in opposition in the Voter’s Pamphlet says “Food labeling regulations should be set at the federal level to ensure fairness for consumers, farmers and food products.”

Does that mean the council will start lobbying Washington to enact such protections any time soon? Or that Congress will step up to the plate on the matter? You know the answer to both of those questions.

In fact, there are a lot of conditions in Oregon that are not the case throughout much of the rest of the country, such as Death with Dignity, no sales tax, no self-serve gasoline, and so on. That’s how we like it.

Labeling would force more regulation, red tape, tracking, documentation, and cost to farmers

It might, but consumers who appreciate non-GMO products will pay for it. In terms of the global economy, this is probably the wave of the future. More than 60 countries around the world require genetically engineered labeling on food products, from the Scandinavian nations and Australia to Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey.

Remember when Japan and other Asian countries temporarily banned wheat imports from Oregon after GMO wheat was found growing in eastern Oregon last year? We can expect to see more of that if Oregon and the rest of the U.S. continue to resist GMO labeling.

Voting on ballot measures becomes much easier when you follow the money and look at who supports or opposes the issue. For much of the past 20 years, I didn’t even have to read the arguments in the voter’s pamphlet if Kevin Mannix (a hardline Republican state legislator), Bill Sizemore (anti-tax activist), or Mark Hemstreet (reactionary owner of the Shilo Inn chain of motels) supported or opposed something. I automatically knew I had to vote the opposite.

Fortunately for Oregon, Mannix has suffered repeated defeats in recent runs for governor and Congress, Sizemore was convicted of felony tax evasion, and Hemstreet has stayed fairly quiet on his Montana ranch in recent years (though a California bank sued him for missed loan payments in 2012).

With Measure 92, big money has poured in from out-of-state corporations such as DuPont ($4.5 million, so far), Monsanto ($4 million), and Coca-Cola (nearly $1.2 million). These same companies and their cohorts spent about $45 million to defeat a similar GMO labeling campaign in California, and $22 million in Washington.

If they have that much money to spend on trying to fight change, why is “increased cost” a concern? What are they so afraid of? And when’s the last time you believed a giant corporation was truly concerned about the effect of rising food costs on the poor?

The Oregonian has identified only 78 separate contributors to the No campaign, but thousands of Oregonians have contributed small amounts in support of Measure 92. Big corporations outside the state versus individual citizens living in Oregon: which would you side with?

Out-of-state supporters include Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream co-founder Jerry Greenfield (whose company has also donated $130,000 to the campaign), the nonprofit Consumers Union (which publishes Consumer Reports magazine), and, according to an announcement by GMO Free Oregon earlier this week, longtime vegetarian Sir Paul McCartney.

Much of the time, an issue-based election battle is also an urban-vs.-rural clash in Oregon, whether the focus is land use, criminal sentencing, or gay rights. For once, that may not be so much the case here: last spring, two of the more rural and conservative counties at the south end of the state, Jackson and Josephine, voted to ban the farming of GMO crops, which may indicate the depth of citizen opposition.

So it’s only a question of how easily a chunk of the electorate may be swayed by the deceptive television ads offering the arguments I listed above, which are being funded by millions from companies headquartered outside our state borders.

At stake is not just what goes into the food we’re eating. There’s a larger environmental issue. The main reason food crops have been genetically modified is to withstand stronger and nastier pesticides, because pests have grown more resistant to chemical attacks.

In other words, our food has been altered in laboratories because it’s caught in the crossfire between insects that want a taste and big farming corporations and their chemical-manufacturing clients who seek to continue to profit from growing food plants on a grand scale.

The issue of whether genetically modified food poses a risk to human consumption is a separate one. Honestly, we probably don’t know; not enough testing has been done, primarily because hardly anyone cared to fund it in the past.

In a sense, genetic modification has always been with us. What we call genetic engineering today is a highly speeded-up version of agricultural and gardening techniques that created new flowers and foods over thousands of years, and new breeds of dog over decades and at least dozens of generations.

Could we be harming ourselves by eating GMO foods? Who knows? But it’s probably wisest to err on the side of caution, yes? And it’s definitely healthier to hit the brakes on overuse of pesticides in our fields and forests.

Vote yes on Measure 92.