How to keep something dangerous on the market
(Thanks to Iris Matthews)
The Pesticide Lobbyists (and the defenders of GM crops and foods and herbicides like Roundup) use a well-recognized series of lies and delaying tactics to dominate the debate in the Press and on Radio and Television. The classic strategies are: Outright Denial; Smokescreen and Obfuscation; Diversions and Delays; Sowing Doubt everywhere. Entire teams of Public Relations Specialists are employed to fill the newspapers, TV chat shows and online forums/ Social media with adaily drip feed of Propaganda. Well known public figures are paid or persuaded to make public pronouncements on TV and in the Press, praising the poisoners and condemning objectors as 'hippes', 'conspiracy theorists' and 'back to the Stone Age' idiots.
These techniques of Pyschological Warfare originated decades ago, when corporations challenged the Science about the human health hazards of :
• Lead,
• Tobacco,
• DDT
• Abestos
• Food additives like Aspartame, MSG, Bovine Gonadotrophin etc.
This is now a $billion dollar industry in every country.
These underhand tactics are known as The Four Dog Defence. The basic steps of the defence are:
1. OUTRIGHT DENIAL - THE BIG LIE
At first, the company denies that its product is harmful. This usually includes attempts to discredit scientific studies, or authors of studies, that show harm while the company generate its own fake-studies designed to show no harm.
NOTE: when Bayer license neonicotinoids in 1992 they stated that it could not possibly harm bees because the neonicotinoids NEVER emerged in pollen and nectar. That was an outright lie - 96% of peer-reviewed Science studies and 10,000,000 dead bee colonies prove the lie.
2. SMOKESCREEN - OBFUSCATION
Industry concedes that the chemical is potentially harmful, but insists that animals that might be harmed are not actually exposed to it. This argument works best if industry doesn't test or monitor for the chemical It works even better if you use an obsolete testing methodology, which can never reveal chronic, long term effects Absence of data is often used to argue that there has been no toxic exposure.
NOTE: Bayer and Syngenta admit that neonics are hyper-toxic to bees, but claim that ' in the field' bees never receive a fatal dose.
3. SPREADING DOUBT
• The Pesticide Industry / GM industry admits that people or wildlife are exposed to the poison, but denies that the exposure caused harm. • Industry concedes that the chemical is harmful, but only at very high doses. • It kills bees, or people, but only under unrealistic test conditions, but not at the lower levels or real-world scenarios to which people or wildlife are actually exposed. • They focus on differences between humans and laboratory animals, alleging that harm such as cancer seen in animal experiments is not relevant to people.
Bayer, Syngenta, the NFU, the BBKA and the SBA, and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust have all used this argument. In America, the EPA and various high profile beekeepers are the main spreaders of doubt.
4. DIVERSION
Industry admits the chemical is making people [or bees, or whatever] sick, but tries to shift the blame to avoid regulation and liability.
Possible culprits are improper use by farmers, use under obsolete practices no longer followed (before we knew better), blame other chemicals, medications, smoking, or poor health in the case of bees, the culprits are varroa mites, viruses, poor nutrition, and poor beekeeping.
Bayer, Syngenta, the BBKA, DEFRA, SBA and BBCT have used these arguments extensively