Monsanto, the world’s largest maker of artificial growth hormones for cows, has sued a small milk company in Maine for printing the slogan “Our farmers’ pledge: no artificial growth hormones” on their milk cartons.
Now, personally I couldn’t care less about if my milk was produced from cows who were given artificial growth hormones. But that’s a decision that I, and every individual consumer, should be able to make for ourselves. Monsanto may feel that many consumers are irrational to prefer milk without their product, but shouldn’t consumers have a right to be irrational if they want to be?
To repeat something I posted yesterday, it’s actually a question of if you favor free markets or not. Giving consumers the information they need to make buying choices – and letting consumers decide for themselves what they want or don’t want – is the essence of a free market. And yet it’s likely that many conservatives who claim to favor free markets will side with Monsanto in this case – just as they’ve mostly argued in favor of Nike’s “right” to deceive consumers in the Nike case.
When a free market conflicts with the interests of huge corporations, conservatives favor the corporate interest over the free market almost every time.
Thanks to Alas reader Dan Solomon for the tip..
Monsanto doesn’t have the best record when it comes to these kinds of things. Aren’t they the ones responsible for all that carnage in Alabama?
This case is absolutely ridiculous. If Company A sells a product that contains 275% of the RDA of cholesterol, and Company B makes a product with no cholesterol, shouldn’t they be able to trump up the health value of the product? Wait… there isn’t a cholesterol lobby, is there? I wouldn’t want to get sued…
Basically, Monsanto is suing for the right to tell other companies what they can and cannot say about their products… now here’s a case where this liberal certainly can appreciate tort reform!
I think almost anyone would consider Monsanto’s position to be ludicrous on its face (not to mention hateful). But they have the bucks to push the little Maine company through legal fees in the hope that they cave. Somehow this should be preventable.
OTOH, saying that “And yet it’s likely that many conservatives who claim to favor free markets will side with Monsanto in this case”, even with the slightly different Nike case to support it, reminds me of rightists (my word!) telling us how liberals are bound to react if something happens, as they do so often. Phrased that way, I think it’s a misjudgement. I suspect you could marshal sustained evidence that right-wing US judges will support Monsanto’s position: that’s what they do (now there’s my own generalization).
I switched to organic milk for health and humanitarian reasons (growth hormone is dreadful for the cows) but I have to say, there’s no comparison with the taste. After you’ve drunk the (I suppose comparatively) cruelty-free stuff for a week, the other stuff tastes like that blue skim milk powder you have to add water to.
It’s the same with grain-fed chicken eggs.
If you’re any kind of a foodie, it’s worth a shot.
I don’t drink milk, being a vegan, but I don’t see how a company toting that its milk doesn’t have any growth hormones (or, rather, the milk doesn’t come from cows who have been given growth hormones) is any different than a company saying that its milk is organic. Why isn’t Monsanto suing Horizon for advertising that its dairy products are all organic? In fact, I think that Horizon has a fairly prominent label on their products that proudly proclaims them to be hormone free, but I could be wrong: I only ever pass by it in the grocery store, so I’ve not taken a good look at the packaging.
Wait… why isn’t every farmer in America suing White Wave for making soy milk? I mean, c’mon… they advertise it as “Lactose Free”… whaddup widdat? The possibilities are endless with these sort of lawsuits.
Do you happen to know what statute they’re suing under?
Some states have these ridiculous laws against “disparaging agricultural products” (remember the Oprah case in Texas?), and they may be arguing that saying that milk A is free of hormones is to implicitly say that milk that’s not free of hormones isn’t as good.
Fingers crossed, hopefully they won’t win.
Amp, your point about free markets is spot on. Conservatives do not support free markets. Read Adam Smith and the other free market theorists, and you find that the vaunted efficiency and fairness of free markerts are predicated on certain assumptions about the starting conditions: There must be no monopolies, no monopsonies, equal access to capital, equal access to information about price and quality of goods, no discrimination, and probably a half dozen other things I can’t remember.
Is there a single one of those things that the “free market uber alles” people reliably believe in? Breaking up monopolies is punishing success! Discrimination isn’t any of the government’s business! And how dare you provide accurate information about how your milk was produced?
And why isn’t Spike Lee suing SpikeTV for using the word “spike”…oh, wait…he did…or was…
I hate to sound like the Tort-Reformer-in-Chief, but maybe we should have some sort of frivolous lawsuit penalties in the U.S. Heaviest penalties for the Monsantos and beef industry-types who seek to quell freedom of speech (and information). But not being a law-talking-guy, I have no idea how such legislation could be written.
Hey, I support Nike in the Kasky case, but I also support Oakhurst in this case. So long as it’s actually true that their cows are given no BGH (bovine growth hormone), they can say so on their products. Monsano is welcome to start a PR campaign arguing that it doesn’t matter, or that BGH is a good thing if they want to, and Oakhurst can respond with its own PR if they so choose, but no company should be able to sue to prevent another from telling consumers about the factual properties of their products. If I sell t-shirts, and I tell potential buyers that “my t-shirts are made with no blue dye,” that’s not disparaging towards blue dye. It simply gives consumers information about my t-shirts. What Monsano objects to is the fact that some consumers don’t like BGH, and they don’t want factual information out there reminding us that there are some people who believe (with good reason, IMO) that BGH is bad because they don’t want debate on the subject. I find that stifling of debate on the subject highly troubling.
Incidentally, I don’t consider myself a conservative at all, but I think you unfairly disparage free marketeers when you insinuate that they’re likely to be hypocrites on this one. A lot of conservative politicians may side with Monsano because of agricultural lobbies, but conservative voters, especially outside the farm states, are often much more reasonable than you give them credit for.
I just ran across this on another blog, and it seemed tangentially relevant: Apparently the FDA now effectively says it should be legal to make false health claims on a product as long as you also include fine print that retracts it.
Conservative ethics: It’s okay for me to lie if it’ll help me make more money, but it’s not okay for you to tell the truth if it’ll prevent me from making more money.
Corporations talk a good game about free markets, market forces, “let the market decide” etc., but they fight like dogs whenever someone actually tries to let that happen. GMO labels on food, labelling meat with country of origin, both fought against by “free market” boosters.
Monsanto, as usual, is a very innovative company, at least when it comes to suing people.
If I understand the relevant Constitutional law correctly, current Supreme Court jurisprudence makes it very difficult to restrict commercial speech that is true.
Monsanto probably has no legal cause of action; this is probably a strategic lawsuit designed to win by having bigger pockets. One can hope that the judge is a firebrand.
There’s already enough of a wealth of evidence to show that the republican right doesn’t support free markets – just look at the tarrifs that it keeps in place!
But from your post, the implication is that Bush should support free markets, and that free markets are a wonderful thing. They would be if all countries operated on a relatively even playing field, granted, but we’re not there yet. Free markets should be compulsory for developed states and optional for developing states, in my view (pretty much the oppposite of the washington consensus).
And I’m not even sure about the statement that free markets are about letting consumers decide for themselves! Consumers certainly don’t get to choose a price point of a product themselves (that would be absurd). The whole point of a free market is that the market decides. And if the market decides not to tell you what you’re eating/drinking, you’re in trouble. But don’t quote me on that, I could do with thinking it through a bit first…
When they’re talking about “the market” as in “let the market decide” it doesn’t mean let the supermarket decide :-). It means that customers are part of “the market”. Supposedly they do control the prices by buying when the price is right and not when it’s not a good price. Supposedly they do the same for other issues, like quality, and things that affect the environment (“Dolphin-safe tuna” etc.) as well as things like GMO foods and milk produced either with or without growth hormone. All well and good.
But of course the customer can’t do this if they’re prevented from knowing what the products’ producers are doing with that product, so when the producers fight to keep the customer from knowing, as they continually do, they are interfering with the free market they claim to support. The “free market” they espouse then becomes one where the producer is free to do things however they want, and the customer gets a few letters changed in their name and becomes a “consumer”, whose only choice is to buy blindly or not buy at all. This, of course, is not a free market at all, but a Newspeak version of it.
As a side point, there are reasons you might want to care whehter bovine growth hormone is used is used or not.
To sustain the strain on their bodies produced by bovine growth hormone, cows need increased protein – provided by feeding them meat. This is how Britain got mad cow disease.
Also that strain also requires routine feeding of antibiotics. It is not proven absolutely that feeding animals antibiotics when they are not sick increases anti-biotic resisance in human diseases. But there is a lot of reason to think so – including the tendency of bacteria to do gene swaping among diseases. In other words if you produce antibiotic resistant bacteria in cows, even if they don’t infect humans, there is a good shot that they will swap genes with a human disease and spread to antibiotic resistance to that human disease.
In general, we are taking some pretty big risks with human health by using bovine growth hormone.
All those pro-GM forces were so opposed to legislating labelling during the election decision on Measure 27. Yet, they are eager to legislate against voluntary labeling. They don’t want the market to have the information it needs to decide…because they know if the market decides, it will decide against them.
Honestly, if you had a choice between a GM tomato and a regular tomato, what would you choose? If you had a choice between hormone-added milk and non-hormone-added milk, what would you choose? Considering the information about hormones and endocrine disrupters, I wonder.
Gar, thanks for that info. I don’t like BGH or GM, or the way we’re trying to force Africa to accept our GM crops instead of Europe’s non-GM ones. Amp, did you do a post on this? How you have to repurchase every year, etc.? There’s a “free market.”
Evan: “Conservative ethics: It’s okay for me to lie if it’ll help me make more money, but it’s not okay for you to tell the truth if it’ll prevent me from making more money.” This is brilliant, and seems sadly supported by recent events.
This case is just screaming for a Rule 11 motion, with sanctions against Monsanto and their white-shoe lawyers….
Amy P. wrote:
A lot of conservative politicians may side with Monsano because of agricultural lobbies, but conservative voters, especially outside the farm states, are often much more reasonable than you give them credit for.
Point well taken.
That said, here in Oregon organized support for Measure 27 (a measure which would have required labeling of food made using genetic-modification techniques) came all but exclusively from lefty groups. Where were the grassroots conservatives on this one, or the conservative columnists and talk-radio hosts? They seemed firmly lined up against the idea of labeling food. If there were conservatives on the pro-labeling side, they were pretty quiet about it.
(But then again, everyone on the pro-labeling side was relatively quiet; the proponants of Measure 27 were outspent by a ratio of 25 to 1.)
By the way, why don’t you consider yourself a conservative? I don’t necessarily disagree, I’m just curious as to your reasoning.
If I had to guess, knowing almost nothing about the issue, I’d say that conservatives didn’t support Measure 27 because forcing companies who use GM products to label is an entirely different matter from allowing companies to state whether they use GM products. I support the latter, but not the former, and I hope that companies who don’t use GM products will label so that consumers who don’t want to eat GM foods know what they want to buy. I’m just not comfortable with the government setting those standards. I prefer a system akin to the “Underwriters Laboratory” or “Good Housekeeping Seal” deal, where a private group certifies products, and consumers can trust that the private group will choose quality products with certain specifications, in this case, a lack of GM ingredients.
I don’t consider myself a conservative because I’m not one. I don’t believe that the government has any business telling us what to do with our money, sure, but I also don’t believe they have any business telling us what to do with our own bodies. I consider myself a free market liberal, which means to me that I believe in most of the goals liberals champion (free speech, equal rights for all citizens, helping the poor, a cleaner environment, etc.), but I don’t believe that the best way to achieve those goals is through laws forcing people to change their voluntary behavior. I support lots of things that would make most conservatives shudder: abortion rights, strict liability for environmental damage, an end to protectionist trade policies and business subsidies, open immigration, etc. I’m not a huge fan of the word libertarian, since it’s so tied in the general culture to Ayn Rand and a lot of other crazies, but that’s the closest.
Well, I am someone who is extremely sensitive to hormones..I stopped eating hormone fed beef because my hair was thinning (I’m a 30 year old woman) and gosh darn if it didn’t get better. So I would be thrilled to have companies label their products hormone free. How dare Monsanto dictate that I don’t have the right to protect myself?? We don’t yet know what side effects all these animal hormones might have on us…we should be able to avoid them if we so desire.
Amp,
“Conservatives” are an extinct species in America. The corporate agenda is simply masquerading as conservatism, and I wonder how long it will be before some of the more decent RW types (Tacitus comes to mind) will figure this out. John Moyers of TomPaine.com wrote a good piece on this subject- (enlcosed below)