Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association lobbying group, has released a letter citing Gandhi. In it he described Gandhi leading a salt tax boycott by illegalliy gathering salt himself at the seaside.

Now,  he says the recently signed bill S.764- National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard  is a cop-out because most GMO ingredients will be exempt under this law. What the bill says is disclosure is required for

“…a food that contains genetic material that has been modified through in vitro recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) techniques”

You might think that is pretty broad, but Cummins has been banging on about “GMO ingredients” that include things like sugar from sugar beets, (or corn syrup from Bt corn) even though they contain no genetic material or proteins or DNA! It’s just sugar (or corn syrup), but if it was produced by glyphosate resistant beets, or Bt corn it must be evil. Sorry Ronnie, you are talking through your hat! They are nutritionally identical to the on-GMO versions.

The bill directs the Secretary of Agriculture to come up with a labeling standard within 2 years that allows foods to be labeled with text, a QR code or a phone number where consumers can get full ingredient information including which ingredients are produced by genetic engineering.

The bill also supersedes any state laws, such as Vermont’s very stringent law that has driven over 3000 products from its stores.

But in fact, Cummins and his crowd got most of what they wanted. Products containing genetically engineered ingredients will have some sort of label. The difference is that the label can be quite subtle rather than the scary sort of statements his anti-science lobby had wanted.

The fact is, this bill is a compromise between anti-GMO extremists and farmers and grocers who would be impacted by an extreme bill like Vermont’s. It is not what scientists wanted (no label because GMOs are not an ingredient) and it is not what Cummins’ crazies wanted (huge warning labels despite no evidence of harm), but good politics is a compromise, and we have to actually praise Senators Roberts and Stabenow and Congress for accepting this compromise.

But the OCA wants a boycott

Seeing his whole disinformation campaign sinking into the sea of reason, Cummins proposes to compare himself to Gandhi and launch a boycott, because he continues to claim that GMOs have “caused a terrible toll on our health” (according to charlatans like Joe Mercola). So he is trying to launch a “buycott…[to] reject brands owned by corporations that lobbied against GMO labeling.”

And this is the best part. They way you join in this “buycott” is to download an app to your smart phone that allows you to scan product barcodes in the supermarket and find out if they are produced by companies that support this bill.

Do you get this? Cummins and the OCA opposed this compromise GMO labeling bill because you had to scan a QR code. But it’s OK to use an app the OCA has had created to find out which products not to buy. It’s only OK if they do it, but not if the Secretary of Agriculture does! His app also sends “nyah..nyah” messages to the companies that supported the bill. This is surely going to have a great effect on E-mail filtering software!

Meanwhile, Cummins continues to make unsupported claims about “toxic chemicals” (GM crops use fewer pesticides, not more) and tries to make you believe you cannot trust the scientific establishment but you can trust an organic lobbying group instead. This defies common sense, and he probably knows it.