One year after launching the GMO Answers campaign on social media, “U.S. companies that develop GMOs have further committed to a multimillion-dollar campaign to defeat attempts to add GMO labels” to genetically engineered foods, says Reuters. A spokeswoman for GMO Answers says member companies have agreed to spend millions of dollars “for several more years on this campaign,” says the story. Monsanto and Dow Chemical, two premier biotech seed companies, are among the backers of the social media campaign.
The Environmental Working Group says in a report, “Companies and organizations opposed to labeling foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients disclosed $9 million in lobbying expenditures that made reference to GE labeling in the first quarter of 2014 – nearly as much as they spent in all of 2013.”