MONSANTO CRIES OVER SPURNED MILK

Monsanto’s in deep denial over consumer rejection of rbST, the genetically engineered bovine growth hormone that lets dairy farmers squeeze more milk out of their cows.

Wake up and smell the rbST-free latte! Companies from Starbucks to Safeway are responding to the demand for rbST-free milk by switching to dairies that don’t use rbST, which is known to cause disease in cows and may cause disease in humans, too. As I noted last August, there’s a severe, nationwide shortage of organic milk due to skyrocketing demand.

Monsanto’s public affairs manager, Andrew Burchett, claims the widespread rejection of rbST dairy products “is driven by deceptive marketing ploys and a few activists who oppose most aspects of modern dairy farming.”

Huh, looks like those “few activists” have pressured California’s largest dairy processor, California Dairies, Inc., to announce last Thursday that starting August 1st, it would no longer accept milk from dairy farmers who rely on rbST to boost their production.

Richard Cotta, CDI’s CEO, gave the reason for the switch as “strictly consumer demand…In the end, the customer is king. We felt we needed to do this from an economic point of view. Demand is greater now than we can provide.”

CDI processes nearly half the state’s milk, so the move is a big blow to Monsanto.

“It’s bad news for California dairy producers,” according to Burchett, “when activist pressure groups and shady marketing ploys take away their choice to use FDA-approved technology…what’s next? Reproductive hormones? Antibiotics? Pesticides?”

I love this kind of Alice-in-Astroturf-Land logic, in which a few rabid rabble rousers seek to deny Americans the freedom to eat foods tainted by toxic agricultural “advances.”

On Thursday, the same day that CDI announced their new rbST-free policy, Monsanto released a study that claims there’s no discernable difference between milk from hormone-injected cows and rbST-free cows.

But beyond the biotech blah blah blah, certain facts about rbST are undeniable:

Cows injected with rbST suffer a much greater incidence of mastitis, a painful udder infection that requires treatment with antibiotics.

Higher rates of mastitis lead, in turn, to a “higher somatic cell count,” jargon for “more pus in the milk,” according to Andrew Kimbrell, founder and executive director of the Center for Food Safety, and author of Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the Secret Changes in Your Food.

Canada and the European Union have banned rbST out of concern for the harm it poses to animals as well as humans; the only countries that allow it are the U.S., Brazil, and Mexico.

“The suffering of animals alone is enough cause for consumers to avoid rbST-derived dairy and meat products,” notes Kimbrell, but there is also evidence that milk from rbST-treated cows contains higher levels of a hormone that’s been linked to breast, colon, lung, and bone cancer.

So consumers have soured on the whole idea of drinking pus-filled milk squeezed from painfully diseased udders, and who could blame them? Oh, I know--Monsanto.