Agri-Pulse reports that a top lobbyist for PepsiCo Inc. who was formerly a top aide to Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts is taking over as the Agriculture Committee’s chief of staff as it prepares to rewrite federal child nutrition policy. Joel Leftwich, a native of Wellington, Kansas, worked for Roberts, R-Kan., as deputy staff director for the committee before becoming senior director for PepsiCo’s public policy and government affairs team in March 2013.
Experts Recommend Responsible Food Marketing to Children
An expert group convened by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Eating Research has released a set of recommendations calling on the food, beverage, restaurant and entertainment industries to close several loopholes in their voluntary programs and commitments to market healthy food and beverage products to children.
Children’s Online Privacy Rights Must Be Considered by Companies
The Topps Company— the maker of the candy Ring Pops—may have been just trying to have a little marketing fun, writes the privacy blog Safe and Sound. But a recent contest the company sponsored in 2014 around its jewel-shaped ring candy has caused a ruckus among several children’s rights advocacy groups and is at the root of a complaint recently filed with the Federal Trade Commission.
2014 Stories on Health Impact of Corporations-Part II
Last week, I wrote about some of the 2014 news stories that revealed how the auto, pharmaceutical and alcohol industries had harmed health. In this post, I turn to some of the top stories in last year’s coverage of the other industries Corporations and Health Watch follows: food and beverages, firearms and tobacco.
Coca-Cola Sales Go Flat
Early this month, the New York Times reported that Coca-Cola says it will cut between 1,600 and 1,800 jobs in coming months to trim costs. These moves are part of an ongoing restructuring to reflect declining sales of Coca Cola in the United States—and in many other parts of the world. In October, Coca-Cola announced it hoped to cut costs by $3 billion a year through a variety of measures. The savings would be used to pay for more marketing to drive up beverage sales.
But throughout the year, business analysts have been questioning Coke’s strategy. For example, Bloomberg BusinessWeek carried a story called Coke Confronts Its Big Fat Problem. It concluded:
Americans may not have figured out the answer to the obesity epidemic, but for years they’ve pointed to Coca-Cola and other soda as one of the causes. Coke has tried fighting against this. It’s tried ignoring it. Now it accepts this as a reality… (The company) has to persuade people to drink Coca-Cola again, even if they don’t guzzle it like water the way they did before.
Fortune published Coca-Cola’s Problems Reflect a Giant Losing Relevance. Its harsh assessment is that Coca Cola has failed in:
recognizing that the big problem is the leadership team’s fixation with defending its Coke brand, rather than finding new growth businesses as the market moves away from carbonated soft drinks. This problem requires the CEO and his entire management team to step up their strategy efforts, not just fire the leader who has been updating the branding mechanisms.
For public health, Coke’s failures are our success. The continuing decline in soda consumption is in part a reflection of the health policy and education campaigns that have changed the image of soda that Coke has tried to market. Declining sales at Coke now hold the promise of less diabetes and diet-related diseases in the future. Key questions for the coming years are will Coke’s fizzed up advertising be able to delay the shift in tastes and to what extent will the company apply tobacco industry response to flat sales in the US by stepping up marketing in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Big Tobacco Takes Up Vaping
When e-cigarettes were introduced a few years ago, it wasn’t clear if the makers of this product would take business away from the tobacco industry or become a subsidiary of the nicotine delivery business. Last year, most of the world’s largest tobacco companies expanded their e-cigarette business, suggesting the emergence of an integrated Big Nicotine business. For example, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, R.J. Reynolds in 2014 scaled up marketing of its Vuse brand of e-cigarettes from four states to a national market. Lorillard sells Blu eCigs and controls about 40 percent of the current market. Altria Group owns two e-cig brands and plans to expand nationally as well. While some public health advocates continue to argue that e-cigarettes have the potential to reduce tobacco use, others make the case that the increasing control of the e-cigarette market by transnational tobacco companies does not bode well for this product being used to advance public health or reduce the demand for nicotine products. As public health advocates debate our positions on e-cigarettes, we need to keep our eyes not just on the theoretical potential of a new technology but on the actual practices of the industry that makes and markets the product.
Gun Fight Turns to the States
Just as policy battles on abortion and gay marriage have bounced between state and federal levels over the last decade, the fight on gun safety, long played out on the federal level, has now bounced back to the state level. Earlier this month, the New York Times noted that,
“the gun control movement, blocked in Congress and facing mounting losses in federal elections, is tweaking its name, refining its goals and using the same-sex marriage movement as a model to take the fight to voters on the state level.”
Last November, Washington state voters approved a ballot measure that will require broader background checks on gun buyers and gun safety advocates are looking to add ballot measures in 2016 in Nevada, Arizona, Maine and Oregon.
At the same time, gun rights advocates are using state legislatures to seek to overturn federal guns laws. According to one report, eight states have recently passed laws voiding federal firearms regulations and in the last decade more than 200 such bills have been considered by states.
A recent report by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence found that states with stronger gun regulation have lower gun death rates, and the states with weaker regulation have higher gun death rates. As gun safety advocates study the successes of the gay marriage movement in using state level successes to win national victories, they’ll need to devise strategies that choose the settings and the messages that can ultimately lead to national successes in reducing gun violence.
For the Planet and Future Generations, New Congress May Be Most Dangerous Yet
According to Wenona Hauter of Food and Water Watch, writing in Common Dreams, the swearing-in of the 114th Congress this week spells trouble for our food, water and environment, and for all those who seek to champion healthy, safe communities for our families. We may be looking at the most hostile Congress ever in terms of protecting the environment, she warns.
Why McDonald’s says it wants to be in the schools
If McDonald’s has its way, reports CBS MoneyWatch the three R’s might end up being reading, writing and Ronald McDonald. That’s because the fast-food giant is planning to refocus on marketing to children and families in response to a serious problem on its plate. Thanks to changing tastes, the fast-food chain has suffered seven straight months of declining U.S. sales, with parents increasingly opting for rivals’ seemingly healthier meals.
Gaps in FDA’s Antibiotics Policy
In December 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took steps to eliminate the use of antibiotics in food animals for growth promotion. It asked drug companies to remove indications for “feed efficiency” and “weight gain” from labels of antibiotic products and require veterinarians to oversee addition of these drugs to feed and water. The new policy is intended to reduce antibiotic misuse, which contributes to the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A new report from the Pew Charitable Trust examines gaps in FDA policy that may allow some harmful practices to persist.
Walmart’s Hunger Games: How America’s Largest How America’s Largest Employer and Richest Family Worsen the Hunger Crisis
re-posted from EatDrinkPolitics
In the United States, 49 million individuals suffer from hunger, including 15.8 million children. In the last three years, the number of participants in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called food stamps) grew by 42% to more than 47 million Americans. The growth in SNAP eligibility is not just due to people who can’t find work, but also because many people are under- employed or in jobs where they are paid too little to cover their own food costs.
The hunger crisis in the United States is the result of larger economic factors at play. Today, income inequality is at its highest levels since the 1920s. While corporate profits are reaching record levels, the majority of American families are working harder for less and average wages are at the lowest point since 1948.
Men and women are looking for fair pay for their hard work, but low wages, erratic scheduling and involuntary part-timing are keeping them from supporting their families, including putting a warm dinner on the table at night.
At Walmart – our country’s largest employer – too many workers are unable to provide food for their families because they are paid poverty wages and cannot get full-time, consistent hours.
Walmart and the Walton family are at the center of a profit-building empire that allows them to build their wealth off of workers’ inability to afford food.
In addition to paying workers so little that too many rely on public assistance, Walmart and the Waltons are building their wealth with income from food stamps.
And while Walmart and the Waltons often tout their anti-hunger charities, this giving, through its huge public relations push, shifts the conversation away from addressing the larger food insecurity issues the corporation and its owners are creating.
The conversation they want to avoid is how Walmart and the Waltons have helped to create the hunger crisis in America. They also have the ability – more than any other business – to lift hundreds of thousands of working families out of poverty by improving jobs at its stores, which would, in turn, reduce hunger across the nation.
Walmart Sets the Standard for Low- Pay in Retail and the Economy
A close look at the causes of hunger in America shows the overlap with the symptoms of the Walmart economy. And that is no coincidence.
In the U.S. today, the fastest growing job sector is low-wage retail jobs, with one in every 10 retail employees working at Walmart. With its size and reach nationwide, Walmart’s pay and other practices set the standard for the retail industry and drive down pay in other industries as well.
Estimates of hourly Walmart wages vary, but one study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Walmart cashiers average just $8.48/hour, while another industry report found the average pay to be $8.818 per hour. At this rate, an employee who works 34 hours per week, which is Walmart’s definition of full-time, is paid $15,500 per year, which is about $8,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of four.
Walmart has confirmed that the company pays the majority of its workers less than $25,000 a year. As a result, many Walmart workers are at or near the federal poverty line and are unable to feed and clothe their families and provide basic necessities for their children.
Walmart’s Systematic Part-Timing Keeps Take Home Pay Low
Since 2006, the retail and wholesale sector has cut one million full-time jobs while adding 500,000 part-time jobs. As many as 600,000 Walmart workers currently work part-time, although many want to work full-time and are pushing for additional hours. The company intensified its hiring of temporary workers last year, while continuing to deny full-time hours to many employees who want them.
Read more on Walmart’s Hunger Games
Five Questions for the Food Movement after Berkeley Approves a Soda Tax
On Election Day November 4th, Berkeley voters made their town the first in the United States to approve a soda tax, endorsing Measure D to levy a penny-an-ounce tax on soda by a 3 to 1 margin , 76% for and 24% against. The victory came despite the fact that Big Soda poured $2.3 million dollars into the campaign, about $409 per voter that sided with the industry position. For the food justice movement, the win demands a careful analysis of the lessons learned. I raise 5 questions to get us started in this analysis.
1. Everybody knows that Berkeley is the capital of the Left Coast but the town has set important national trends before. What are the characteristics of Berkeley and the campaign that may be generalizeable to other places in the US?
“We fully expect other communities to take on the soda industry and succeed,” said Yes on D Co-Chair Dr. Vicki Alexander after the victory. “Berkeley has a proud history of setting nationwide trends, such as nonsmoking sections in restaurants and bars, curb cuts for wheelchairs, curbside recycling, and public school food policies. But many communities have the same ingredients that made Measure D possible in Berkeley: proactive parents and community leaders who care about the health of their kids.” Yes on D built a broad, diverse and inclusive community coalition.
A report in the Contra Costa Times provided further perspectives on Berkeley’s role as trend setter rather than outlier. Tom Lochner wrote:
Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, is among those who believe the No on D camp is mistaken to view Berkeley as a stand-alone oddity. Rather, Goldstein describes Berkeley as “a pretty significant trendsetter for what happens in California and what happens in the country, on the progressive side.” “If you think about the Free Speech Movement, care and attention to people with disabilities, curb cuts for wheelchairs, indoor smoking ordinances, fast-food packaging — major environmental, social justice and public health movements have begun in Berkeley, and often, when they began, people saw them as radical,” Goldstein said. “But because they focused on justice and protecting people and the environment, those movements caught on, and spread across the country quite quickly.”
Dozens of local, statewide and national organizations supported Yes on D. We need to understand how the Coalition attracted this support and what other communities can do to replicate this success.
2. What can we learn about framing public health messages that counter Big Soda from the Berkeley campaign?
The Coalition, learning in part from the tobacco movement, painted Big Soda as the opponent. And obligingly, Big Soda did everything possible to live up to its stereotype—spending millions, suing the city, and distorting science. What will Big Soda learn from this defeat? Their public message is that no other town in America would ever follow Berkeley down this path but we can expect that they will vary their tactics on the next battle to incorporate what they learned here. Anticipating Big Soda’s next steps will help the food moment to get ready for the next campaigns.
3. In other places—like San Francisco – and on other issues—like GMO labeling—health advocates lost elections. What accounted for these losses?
In San Francisco, the soda tax measure also won majority support but to pass it required two-thirds approval in order to levy a tax that would be dedicated to health. To win in multiple settings, advocates will need to better understanding the ways that business and political elites set ground rules that thwart popularly supported measures and also to choose battles where the terms are most favorable. As Michele Simon has written, the GMO battles in Oregon and Colorado united four giants of the processed food/agribusiness industries– Dupont, Monsanto, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola were the largest donors to these campaigns—as well as to the efforts to defeat soda taxes in California. As Simon noted, “The good news is that the more we identify these shady lobbying tactics and dirty tricks and expose the moneyed interests behind them, the less effective the industry efforts will be.”
4. Taxes are one strategy to reduce soda consumption. What are others? How do we decide on the best portfolio of strategies?
From the tobacco control movement, we have learned that no single strategy can by itself diminish the toll from corporate promotion of disease. In tobacco, it was the combination of taxes, clean air laws, counter-advertising, litigation and community mobilization that led to the decline in tobacco use. Some in the food movement note the limitations of soda taxes but don’t always propose alternatives. Previously, I have described eight approaches to reducing sugar consumption. Now is the time to consider how to assemble the most effective portfolio of approaches to enable us to save lives in this generation instead of 40 years in the future.
5. What’s the potential –and limits—of reducing diet-related disease by taking on one product or one industry?
Current evidence suggests that no ingredient plays a stronger role in diet-related disease than sugar and no product more consistently delivers dangerous doses of sugar to broad sections of the population than soda and other sugary beverages. That’s the rationale for targeting soda and sugar for public policy and regulation. But it is also true that the more fundamental cause of the rise of diet-related diseases is a food production system that values profit over public well-being and highly processed food over whole food and that promotes the least healthy foods most heavily and the healthier ones almost not at all. The deepest solution, therefore, is not more regulation for each of the hundreds or thousands of harmful products but instead a transformed food system where making healthy food available to all is the priority. Charting the paths that can lead from incremental policies like soda taxes to transformational ones that move us away from our disease–inducing diets is the challenge of the day.
More on Soda Taxes and the California votes
Berkeley breaks through on soda tax. By Helena Bottemiller Evich in Politico.
Berkeley Wins: What’s Next for Soda Taxes? By Dana Woldow in BeyondChron the Voice of the Next.
Big Food Uses Dirty Tricks in Ballot Fights over GMO Labeling and Soda Taxes. By Michele Simon In Al Jazeera America
Yesterday’s elections: plenty of good news for the food movement. Food Politics By Marion Nestle
When Grassroots Protest Rallies Have Corporate Sponsors. Nightline ABC News
Big Food Uses Dirty Tricks in Ballot Fights Over GMO Labeling, Soda Taxes
Editor’s Note: In Tuesday’s election, voters in Colorado rejected a measure to require labeling of foods made with genetically modified ingredients. A similar measure in Oregon did better but appears likely to lose as well. And in California, Berkeley voters approved a soda tax, but San Francisco voters rejected such a tax. The story below, written by Michele Simon before the election, provides the background for these contests.
cross-posted from Al-Jazeera America
On Nov. 4, voters in three Western states will decide four food-related ballot measures that seem to have little in common: The two state-level measures (in Oregon and Colorado) would require genetically engineered (aka GMO) foods to be labeled as such, and two local initiatives in California (in San Francisco and Berkeley) would place a small tax on sugary soft drinks.
But they do have something in common. A large portion of the opposition for all four measures is being funded by two megacorporations: Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Moreover, the opposition is using many of the same tactics.
Let’s start with the money — and there’s lots of it. In Oregon the biggest donors to the $16.3 million fund opposing the GMO-labeling measure, after biotech giants Dupont and Monsanto, are PepsiCo ($1.4 million) and Coca-Cola ($1.17 million), according to reporting by The Oregonian. Supporters of the measure have raised a respectable $6.7 million so far.
In Colorado the opposition has raised more than $11 million so far, compared with only $440,000 by GMO labeling proponents. Again, Monsanto and Dupont are the largest donors to the “no” campaign, with PepsiCo coming in third, with $1.65 million donated so far, followed by Coca-Cola, with $1.1 million. PepsiCo has a huge stake in these battles. The largest food corporation in the nation, it owns far more than just beverages; the numerous brands under its Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats divisions will also be affected by the passage of GMO labeling laws.
Meanwhile in California, the beverage industry is spending a staggering amount of money to defeat the two soda tax measures. In San Francisco the “no” campaign has just topped $9 million, compared with only $225,000 raised by the measure’s proponents. Across the bay in Berkeley, Big Soda has raised $1.7 million, an astounding figure, given the city’s small size — about 100,000 residents. (Two years ago, industry giants spent close to $2.5 million defeating a similar measure in Richmond, also east of San Francisco.)
Clearly Big Soda — which likes to claim it cares about communities — has a lot of money to throw around to try to buy votes.
The best lies money can buy
So what does all that money get Big Soda? One big bag of dirty tricks.
For GMO labeling, the opposition was able to defeat other ballot measures in California and Washington State mainly by scaring voters into thinking food prices would increase dramatically if GMO labels were required, despite the lack of credible evidence to back up this claim. In Oregon and Colorado, the opponents are trotting out the same tired arguments, claiming the measures would increase grocery bills by hundreds of dollars per year. Never mind a recent report from Consumers Union that estimates that requiring GMO labels would cost only $2.30 per person annually.
Similarly, Big Soda is using money-related fearmongering to dissuade California voters from imposing soda taxes. In San Francisco the opposition is exploiting residents’ anxiety over the city’s affordability. The campaign’s website — tellingly named AffordableSF.com — declares, “The last thing we need is a tax that makes it even more expensive to live and work in San Francisco.” But as blogger Dana Woldow has pointed out at the alternative daily BeyondChron in her excellent series tracking Big Soda’s tactics, soda companies care only about getting low-income communities’ dollars, not about their health and well-being; just consider how the industry targets communities of color with excessive marketing. Moreover, many of these populations suffer disproportionately from health problems caused by drinking too much soda, such as diabetes.
In Berkeley the “no” side is engaging in similar scare tactics by calling the soda tax regressive, suggesting that higher prices will affect poor people the most. But as sustainable-food advocate Anna Lappé (and Al Jazeera contributor) pointed out in The Nation, “Big Soda seems to care about poor people only when a soda tax hits the ballot.”
The food and beverage industry buys credibility by paying others to carry its message to voters.
Hiding behind the locals
Another tactic being deployed in both the GMO labeling and soda tax battles is astroturfing, a common corporate strategy in which lobbyists hide behind a front group or other sympathetic representatives with local and grass-roots credibility. Given their obvious biases, the CEOs of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo can’t exactly go door to door or appear in TV ads to explain why voters should reject GMO labeling or soda taxes. Instead, industry buys credibility by paying others to carry their message to the voters.
In Colorado for example, the “no” campaign has Don Ament as its spokesman in a TV ad opposing GMO labeling. Ament is identified as a “former agriculture commissioner for the Colorado Department of Agriculture,” which is true. But his LinkedIn profile listed his role as a lobbyist for J. Andrew Green and Associates for the past 24 years. Apparently, once word of this got out, Ament scrubbed that job from his profile; an experienced lobbyist, after all, is out of step with the “farmer” image the ads try to portray. Last year in Washington the opposition similarly enlisted the former head of the state’s agriculture department to appear on TV ads urging people to vote “no.”
In the two soda tax battles, astroturfing has reached absurd heights. In San Francisco the industry front group, which calls itself the Coalition for an Affordable City, recruited campaign workers to march in the city’s Chinatown against the measure, posting photos to Facebook showing people holding signs and wearing pro-soda-industry T-shirts. Maureen Erwin, a political consultant working pro bono for the pro-soda-tax campaign, told me these marchers were paid for their appearance. To make the point, Erwin showed up at the rally carrying a sign that read, “This pretend rally is brought to you by Coke and Pepsi.”
And as I wrote in February, The San Francisco Bay Guardian caught Big Soda operatives signing up numerous unwitting local businesses to their list of supporters. In some cases, low-level employees signed on without authority and other businesses were no longer even open.
Finally, in Berkeley, Big Soda is paying young people to pass out literature at transit stations and go door to door. One group of canvassers shunned a Mother Jones reporter, saying they weren’t allowed to speak to media. In The Nation, Lappé described a neighbor’s experience with a canvasser: “He said he was working for a City Council member opposed to the tax, but when asked which one, he couldn’t come up with a name. The City Council is unanimously in support of the measure.”
But Lappé told me she thinks her neighbors are wise to what’s going on and is confident the measure will pass. “Across the board, the people I talk to here are feeling increasingly turned off by a soda industry that thinks it can buy our vote,” she said.
Much is at stake this November for the GMO labeling and soda tax efforts, on both sides. Some think if a soda tax measure can’t pass in liberal Northern California, then it can’t pass anywhere. Similarly, with two states having lost GMO labeling ballot measures already, the last thing that movement needs is another defeat at the polls. On the flip side, a loss for the food and beverage industry on any of these four measures will inspire more cities and states to take up the fight.
The good news is that the more we identify these shady lobbying tactics and dirty tricks and expose the moneyed interests behind them, the less effective the industry efforts will be.
Corporations and Health Watch 