Gazeta Wyborcza is once again heroically forging the way forward in enlightening the benighted masses of Poland. This time the subject is GMOs. To the journalists’ dismay, most Poles don’t want them. In today’s paper Konrad Niklewicz has a short think piece on page two about the question: GW has been debating the subject for the last two weeks but what is really needed is a public information campaign. Who should organize it? The government? No (“niekoniecznie”). The problem with the government is that some of its members are opposed to GMOs. Also, its election promises included hostility to transgenetically modified plants. Niklewicz, therefore, rules them out. The initiative, instead, lies with industry and its related GMO lobby. So it’s okay for those with a vested interest in pushing GMOs to inform us about them but it is not okay for those who are opposed, even if they do happen to be our democratically elected representatives.

While we’re at it, why not have a chemicals and cosmetics company lead the public information campaign on the beauty myth? Or let the cigarette industry inform us about the dangers of smoking…

Niklewicz writes that BASF earned 57.9 billion euros last year. Just 1% of that would buy a lot of “study and education,” he writes, though he doesn’t put the words in inverted commas. By an extraordinary coincidence, BASF has an ad on page seven of the paper. Perhaps the company has already started informing us about GMO.