Sugar Producer

22 Sugar Producer MAY 2016 The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has been called a lot of names for its efforts to gut farm policy, force food labeling and advocate an agenda that puts butterflies and glorified gardeners ahead of modern-day farm families. Its members have been called liars, manipulators, alarmists and far worse. I just call them effective. For all of EWG's faults and failings, there is no denying its effectiveness. EWG recognized generational changes in this country long before others did, and altered its messages and communications tactics accordingly. EWG saw the shifts in the media business and helped fill the void of laid-off journalists with its own research and an aggressive focus on online resources. And EWG members harnessed the power of pathological science and figured out how to exploit it for their own gain. Agriculture has done none of those things. We are at least a decade behind when it comes to communicating with our customers and few communicators in the agricultural world have even identified the root of the problem. Exploring the reasons for agriculture's growing disconnectivity with its customers has been the focus of my past three columns, which examined the differences in generations, a radically altered media landscape and the explosion of pathological science. If you didn't read those columns, I'd encourage you to. Understanding that agriculture has a problem is the first step to solving it, and the sugar industry needs help as it wrestles with things like obesity scapegoating, sin taxes and GMO hysteria. But once the problem is identified, a natural question arises. What can we do to change? I believe it will take four strategic steps. None of them will be easy, and all will require agriculture to get out of its comfort zone. First, agriculture must be completely FROM THE ASA By Phillip Hayes | Director of Media Relations Ag Needs to Upgrade Communications unified. When we fight among ourselves, jockeying for market share or federal dollars, it hurts the farming community as a whole. Today, there are fewer than 200,000 full-time farms in this country left to produce the bulk of the food, feed and fiber that more than 300,000,000 Americans depend on every day. We cannot afford to lose a single farm, and thus, we must be in the business of helping everyone. That means when cotton is under attack at the WTO, or corn finds itself in the crosshairs on Capitol Hill, sugar must be there, arm-in-arm, beating back attacks. And vice versa. Second, agriculture must start using messages that use common sense instead of constantly sounding like a science teacher. While it makes agriculture feel better to dismiss our critics as unscientific and rebut their points with a long list of peer-reviewed facts and figures, the general public could care less. The best way to blunt ludicrous attacks is to point out how dumb such attacks really sound. For example: "If you really expect me to believe that sugar is more addictive than crack cocaine, then you may be high on something yourself. Crack cocaine rips apart families and communities, creates crime and kills people. Meanwhile, sugar has been eaten safely for 2,000 years without problem. It sounds to me like someone is being paid to stoke consumer fears with sensational and unfounded allegations, and it's sad you are offering it any validation." Third, let's go on offense and actually call out our attackers. Part of what makes agriculture such an easy target is the fact that members of the farming community are so nice and unwilling stoop to the level of their opponents. Sometimes you need to fight fire with fire, and there is no shortage of material. Here's what I mean. During the historic drought of 2012, "experts" were making headlines by providing estimates of likely taxpayer-funded crop insurance payments. The political and public perception damage caused to growers at the time was tremendous. Those estimates turned out to be more than $20 billion too high! That's greater than the GDP of Honduras. Yet the farming community just turned the other cheek and never held its accusers accountable for shoddy work. In doing do, the damage remained unrepaired, and the attackers remained unchallenged to replicate similar exaggerated claims in the future. Lastly, agriculture needs to get out of the Stone Age and invest in social media and other forms of online outreach. Most farm groups (sugar excluded) still rely on old-fashioned press releases as its primary vehicle to relay information. That worked in the early '90s. It doesn't today. According to a recent poll, more people said they got their news from social media channels than newspapers. Too bad agriculture lacks the infrastructure to take advantage of that fact, unlike our opponents. At the time I wrote this piece, EWG had 550,000 people following its Facebook page. The American Sugar Alliance (ASA), by comparison, had 45,000. Before you cast stones, ASA is head and shoulders above others in the ag world (our colleagues at corn had 7,000; whereas wheat had 1,800). In other words, we have a lot to learn from folks like EWG and a long way to go until we are communicating our message effectively. Let's get started before it's too late. n Editor's note: Hayes is director of media relations for the American Sugar Alliance. Email him at phillip@sugaralliance.org. Read his previous columns at www.sugarproducer.com.

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