On Tuesday (6th November), Californians voted against new legislation that would have introduced mandatory labelling for food produced using genetically modified organisms amidst a multi-million dollar advertising campaign orchestrated by 'Big Food' companies intent on derailing the proposition.

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Proposition 37 would have seen labels introduced for foods containing GM ingredients throughout California, though critics on both sides of the GM debate had pointed out that the policy contained a number of loopholes, including exemptions for alcoholic beverages, meat from animals fed on GM grain and some foods sold in restaurants.

Nevertheless, the United States remains one of the few developed countries worldwide not to have introduced such labelling laws. GM labelling is standard practice in the EU, China, Japan and Australia. Pundits had said that the fate of the ballot in California would have repercussions for the rest of the United States; several other states have unsuccessfully attempted to introduce GM labelling in the past.

In total, contributors to the 'No on 37' campaign spent $46 million (£28 million) to defeat the measure; the 'Yes' campaign managed to raise just 20 percent of the funds available to their opponents.

The top-ten contributors to the 'No' campaign included a number of multi-national agribusinesses, with DOW AgroSciences, Syngenta, Bayer CropScience and BASF each spending in excess of $2 million to defeat the labelling proposals. Monsanto, which owns patents on the majority of GM crops grown in the United States, where the seeds account for upwards of 90 percent of some principal arable crops, was the campaign's most generous donor, contributing over $8 million to see Prop 37 defeated.

'No' campaign literature and televised advertisements claimed Prop 37 would result in increased food prices and prove detrimental to California's farmers. Following the vote on Tuesday, Kathy Fairbanks, spokesperson for the campaign said, "We've said from the beginning of this campaign that the more voters learned about Prop 37, the less they'd like it. We didn't think they'd like the bureaucracy, higher costs and loopholes and exemptions. It looks like they don't."

However, representatives of the 'Right to Know' campaign (yes on 37) claimed their opponents' comments are cynical given the disparity in spending on the issue. Supporters for the 'Yes' campaign mainly included organisations representing small and organic farmers, as well as food lovers jokingly dubbed the 'Dinner Party' in California, after the United States' notorious 'Tea Party' Republicans.

Contention over threat posed by GM

Each side has accused the other of spreading misinformation in the run-up to Tuesday's vote, much of which revolved around whether GM ingredients could constitute a health risk. The argument stemmed from a French study, published in the run-up to voting, which has been highly contentious since its release and was deemed "inadmissible as evidence" by the EU's food safety watchdog last month.

However, food writer Michael Pollan argued in the New York Times that, "The fight over labelling GM food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food, [which] has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends."

Prior to the information war waged over Prop 37, the 'Yes' campaign had claimed to have the support of over 80 percent of Californian voters, though this support waned as money rolled in to the 'No' campaign's coffers and, in the event, the proposition failed with a vote of 53 percent to 47 percent against.

The high level of spending on the part of corporate players reveals that, even in the United States where GM crops have been grown and consumed for 18 years, the technology is unpopular enough to warrant such a massive reaction to avoid mandatory labelling for products containing GMOs.

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