Dive Brief:
- At the South by Southwest music festival, Monsanto teamed up with Dow Agrisciences to hand out potato chips made with high-oleic soybean oil, which was engineered to be flavor neutral minus trans fats.
- Monsanto is also offering farmers a promotion to sell more of the company's ClimatePro software, which helps farmers monitor the health and nitrogen levels of their crops using satellite imaging and data analysis. Farmers can use the software for free for the first 250 acres, or if they pay for 500 acres, at $1,500, the rest of their crops can be monitored for free.
- Monsanto recently invited TV personality Bill Nye the Science Guy, who was originally anti-GMO, to tour the company's facilities. After spending time with scientists there, Nye announced recently that he had changed his mind about GMOs and will even rewrite a chapter on GMOs in an update to his 2014 book, "Undeniable."
Dive Insight:
These promotional efforts worry some GMO-labeling supporters and other GMO opponents. Wenonah Hauter, founder and executive director of Food & Water Watch, was featured in The Christian Science Monitor, saying that Nye's GMO reversal is "the latest in a trend spearheaded by agribusiness giants to discredit the GMO labeling movement."
But Hauter says that the GMO movement is about much more than just GMOs themselves or even the attempts to label them. In The Christian Science Monitor, she writes, "It’s about the current and future state of our food system—who grows and sells our food, how it’s marketed, and what technologies were used to produce it. By selling seeds to farmers, peddling pesticides, forming corporate monopolies, and funding academic research on GMOs, agribusiness giants like Monsanto have one goal in mind: controlling the food system."
In other GMO news, a Maine legislator has introduced a bill that will hasten the application of the mandatory GMO labeling law the state passed in 2013. Though the labeling law was approved, it cannot go into effect until four other Northeastern states pass similar laws, and only two have done so thus far. On the other far end of the country, Maui County will see its GMO moratorium, which its citizens also approved, postponed again until at least June.