Genetically Modified Foods: Consumers prove they speak for themselves
Capital Press
Don Curlee
May 4, 2007
This is an excerpt from a great article published by Capital Press about why it's important for producers to share with consumers the benefits of genetically modified foods and other biotechnology products, as well as why they are used.
In our free market economy consumers express their preferences to producers of food and other products very surely if not always swiftly. Some products grow moldy on retail shelves before producers get the message that consumers don't want them.
Instant advice to the rescue. Groups that pretend to know what consumers want or should want have proliferated in recent years. Do they really know, or are they pushing an agenda?
University of California food technologist Christine Bruhn undertook to answer that question when she spoke to the annual meeting of Western United Dairymen in Bakersfield in March. Dairymen have been a prime target of quasi-consumer groups.
She addressed biotechnology issues and consumer response to them. Her research shows that about 80 percent of consumers polled believe that biotechnological applications to food or milk-producing animals are positive or have no effect. Less than 20 percent believe they have negative outcomes, and a barely measurable percentage had no opinion.
When consumers know that a product is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, she has found that 45 percent of them don't hesitate to buy it, even if it is enhanced through genetic engineering. So-called consumer and watchdog groups that decry GE products and advances such as cloning might be leading consumers and producers astray.
Bruhn advised the milk producers to point out the benefits of new technology to consumers as well as to producers. "If you ... say you are not going to use a product, that reinforces the negative," she said. She told them it is better to stand up and say why new technology is used.
One group of milk producers recently answered the request by Safeway stores for milk from cows that have been isolated from the hormone rBST. The producer group said it is glad to supply the special edition milk at a premium, just as it would if the request were for milk with little blue dots in it. An announcement like that is right in line with Bruhn's advice.
Even though her research shows that 20 percent of food consumers are not at all likely to buy food enhanced through GE methods even if approved by the FDA, 57 percent are somewhat or very likely to purchase it....
Don Curlee is a veteran ag publications editor and freelancer who writes on a variety of farm-related topics from Clovis, Calif.
Full article at Capital Press.
