IN THE war being waged over the acceptability of food products of biotechnology, the critics already have won a huge victory. They have defined the language of the debate.
Greenpeace activists routinely talk about GM “contamination” in foods. Opponents call it “genetic engineering” or “manipulation” rather than the more benign “genetic modification” or “advancement” favoured by the industry.
Critics have successfully centred the debate on issues of unknown long-term health effects, danger to the environment and growing corporate control over the food supply. In the public domain, these are powerful images.
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For their part, Canada’s biotechnology leaders comfort themselves by complaining their opponents have the advantage of being able to exaggerate and lie to scare consumers.
“We lose the PR battle because some other sides are fast and loose with the facts,” Crop Protection Institute of Canada president Lorne Hepworth groused.
The industry, being responsible business people and all that, cannot respond in kind. They can only insist the real battleground should be science.
Times change. Once upon a time, industry developed a product, prepared an advertising campaign to create public demand and let the market work.
Now the old strategies will not suffice.
The last 40 years have been replete with stories of industrial products marketed before negative and sometimes deadly side-effects were known.
Consumers have become more skeptical.
Last week, acknowledging they are losing the public relations war over the safety, necessity and healthiness of GM foods, leaders of the “life sciences” industry vowed to become smarter and more aggressive in the PR wars.
North Carolina State University language and rhetoric expert Steven Katz told them they have not been careful enough with the language they use.
Language is not a neutral conveyor of information, he said. Emotions, assumptions and biases are imbedded in language. Katz cited a speech by a GM promoter who claimed what is on the market now is just the “tip of the iceberg” of product potential.
But ever since the Titanic, icebergs have had a negative connotation for most, he said.
Think about your language, Katz told the crowd.
CPIC chair Rick Smith, president of Dow AgroSciences Canada Inc., quickly and unconsciously illustrated the point.
A serious problem for industry is the public concern that companies and government regulators are too cozy for comfort.
Smith was introduced to the convention by John Dossetor, former senior adviser to health minister Allan Rock who was hired away from the regulating department last year by Monsanto Canada to become vice-president. At the time, it raised allegations of conflict.
Smith seemed oblivious. “Welcome to this side of the industry,” he said to Dossetor.
Government and industry are two sides of the same industry? For an industry looking to government regulators to give their products credibility, it was a poor choice of language.
