Kavin Senapathy, an author, public speaker and science activist writing about health, medicine, genomics, agriculture and food, recently wrote an editorial piece for Forbes magazine’s online edition. Her editorial calls on the anti-GMOers to rethink their position, especially if it was just based in inexplicable hate for Monsanto. Senapathy writes that it is a good tactic to make people hate Monsanto because, “It’s an effective tactic for anti-GMO organizations to paint their opposition as corporate apologists rather than people who want the best technology used to meet challenges.” Those people trying to meet challenges, by the way, are you. Listen to this audio update for the full story.

Interestingly and despite what you might think, there is an influential group of consumers out there that don’t mind GMOs. We don’t really know what they think about Monsanto, but as far as GMOs go, it’s all good. They are a sub-group of about 12 million adults in the U.S called conscientious connectors. We’ll call this sub-group sustainability opinion leaders. They believe that GMOs are part of a sustainable solution for the future. The technology, in their mind, makes things better. And they respond positively to messages that tell a high-tech, sustainability story, and those messages can include GMOs.

IL Corn, along with other state corn associations and the National Corn Growers Association, is working to understand more about the types of messages that are well received by influential consumers. We need to understand more about what they value, and where those values overlap with how we grow corn. 

Find Senapathy’s article here.