The campaign to pass an initiative requiring labeling of genetically engineered foods has begun.

The biotech industry is already fighting back with its own campaign to confuse voters about the need to pass a labeling law.

If consumers don’t have access to complete and truthful information, we don’t really have a competitive free market.

If you’ve ever found out a product wasn’t as good as you were told it would be before you bought it, you know what I’m talking about.

We don’t need either a nanny state or corporate apologists telling us that we aren’t smart enough to have the right to know what we’re buying.

Fact: Genetic engineering is NOT the same as selective breeding or natural cross-pollination. It is a new and dangerous technology that is already causing health and environmental problems because it is completely different from natural selection or ordinary plant breeding.

Fact: The technology to track the health effects of foods and other products already exists and can be used to track anything from a salmonella outbreak to a cancer cluster to a bioterror attack. All major medical facilities will be using this capability within the next couple of years.

Just think about it: If GE products were labeled, a database of food reactions and other ill effects could be built and used by researchers and insurers.

Keep in mind that unlabeled GE food is banned in countries where the government has to pay for people’s health care. Corporations like Kraft and General Foods quit selling GE foods in Europe, not because GE foods are illegal there, but because they would be required to label them.

Since these countries have a single health care system they would eventually be able to detect adverse health effects associated with consumption of GMOs.

If companies weren’t worried about exactly that kind of data, they would be selling products containing GE corn and soy in Europe with the required labeling.

Here’s the money quote: “If you put a label on genetically engineered food you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it,” said Norman Braksick, president of Asgrow Seed Co., a subsidiary of Monsanto, who was quoted in the Kansas City Star on March 7, 1994.

Americans were assured that Bt toxin from corn and soy would be thoroughly destroyed by digestion and would not end up in the human bloodstream.

A Canadian study from Sherbrooke University Hospital in Quebec found that the toxic Bt protein Cry1Ab was not destroyed, and wound up in the blood serum of 93 percent of the pregnant women tested, 80 percent of the umbilical blood samples, and in the blood of 67 percent of nonpregnant women.

Lack of labeling means that if Bt toxins are ever found to be unsafe for pregnant women, American parents may never really know whether their child’s health problems may have resulted from toxins produced by genetically engineered foods.

Twenty years ago when Michael Taylor left King & Spalding, Monsanto’s law firm, for his infamous stint in the Food and Drug Administration, the field of genetics was still very new.

Taylor devised the concept of “substantial equivalence” which means that despite its patented altered DNA, a GE food is no different than the unaltered food.

The big problem with the substantial equivalence claim is that it established as official policy that no proof of the harmlessness of GMOs would be required before these foods were sold to us.

Many FDA scientists warned that there were indeed differences and potential problems with allergens and toxicities, and decried the politically-motivated decision to release GE crops into the food supply with no comprehensive testing.

At that time, many biotech scientists still thought that one gene caused each genetic trait, which seemed to support the idea that a single gene could be shot into a strand of DNA with predictable and controllable results.

This single gene hypothesis was disproved by the human genome project. Yet biotech corporations have a profitable business model based on shooting genes packaged with viral RNA and antibiotic-resistant genetic material into the genes of our major food crops. This viral material and antibiotic resistance is then reproduced in every single cell of the modified plant.

We can no longer simply take their word that these products are safe for us and our children, so safe that we don’t even need to know what we’re buying and eating.

Let’s not let these companies and their apologists confuse the issue here – this is about our right to know what is in the food we eat.

Roberta Actor-Thomas is a computer consultant and a member of the Committee for a GE Free Lake County in Lake County, Calif.