Biotech Firms Launch Food Ad Blitz
Up to $50 Million Annually Pledged To Woo Consumers

Justin Gillis / Washington Post 4apr00

Fearing that activists will succeed in turning the American public against genetic engineering, the biotechnology industry launched a preemptive strike yesterday, committing up to $50 million a year for a massive advertising campaign.

Organizers of the initiative ran their first television spots yesterday and promised many more to come. They also launched a Web site, opened a call center to take public queries, enlisted famous people to serve as advocates of their cause and pledged to argue their case in every available forum.

The campaign will focus largely on promoting genetically modified food crops, which have been the focus of intense debate overseas and of limited but rising controversy in this country. Critics of biotechnology contend that the products may pose hazards to the environment and consumers, while the industry insists they are safe.

The new effort dwarfs a previous advertising campaign run by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group, that focused on pharmaceutical biotechnology and was aimed mostly at opinion makers in Washington. That campaign cost less than $1 million a year.

The $50 million effort, bankrolled largely by seven companies active in selling genetically modified seeds or related products, is intended in part to counter interest in Congress in requiring labeling or tougher approval standards for foods containing gene-altered ingredients.

"The more people are exposed to information from a variety of sources, the more likely they are to embrace the technology," said Jeffrey Bergau, a spokesman for the Monsanto Co. who is helping direct the new effort. "Our goal is to try to link people to information and data that's based on sound science."

Critics lamented that they could not match the industry's $50 million budget, but they said Americans were unlikely to be fooled by what they characterized as a propaganda blitz.

"My God," said Jeremy Rifkin, a writer, activist and strong critic of agricultural biotechnology. "Fifty million dollars is a lot of money. But I think the campaign is going to backfire. I think the more people hear about genetically engineered foods, the more they come over to our camp."

The ad campaign comes at a time when surveys show most Americans still don't know what the word "biotechnology" means. It is the deliberate manipulation of DNA, the substance that carries genetic instructions, to attain a desirable purpose, such as higher crop yields or better treatments for disease. The manipulation may include deliberately moving genes across species, such as splicing a gene from cold-water fish into the genetic instructions of, say, a tomato plant to confer resistance to cold weather.

Dozens of crops have been altered in some way, but most current controversy focuses on two particular changes. Corn and other crops have been modified to produce a protein poisonous to worms, while another set of crops, including soybeans, have been altered to make them resistant to a common herbicide.

Ingredients from these gene-altered crops, notably lecithin made from soybeans, already show up in the large majority of products on American grocery shelves. The industry contends these ingredients are safe, while anti-biotechnology activists charge that they pose unknown environmental risks and have not been studied long enough to declare them safe for human consumption. The main battle in the United States right now is over food labeling, which activists support and the industry opposes.

The $50 million campaign will be run through a newly formed group called the Council for Biotechnology Information, which is legally distinct from but closely allied with the trade group. Principal backers of the campaign include Monsanto, a unit of Pharmacia Corp; the Aventis CropScience unit of Aventis S.A.; Dow Chemical Co.; DuPont Co.; and others.

Supporting the campaign as "distinguished advisors" are a dozen top researchers and other prominent people, including Andrew Young, former ambassador to the United Nations, and James Watson, a biologist famed for helping to discover the "double helix" structure of DNA in 1953.

The new campaign illustrates the way the Internet is altering attempts to mold public opinion. The council has set up a Web site, www.whybiotech.com, and will eventually create an online archive of the vast regulatory filings that the industry contends prove biotech foods are safe. (Sites criticizing biotechnology are numerous, and include www.greenpeace.org.)

Several activists predicted yesterday that their side of the debate might benefit even from an industry-sponsored ad campaign. A chief problem for them, they said, has simply been making people aware that gene-altered crops are already showing up in the food supply.

Said Charles Margulis, a coordinator for Greenpeace USA: "The nice thing is that consumers are pretty much concerned about biotech foods as soon as they hear about them."