USSEC's Third Moms to China Mission Reaches Many End Users

MAGIC III team members Pilu Giraudo, Nancy Kavazanjian and Dawn Scheier prepare recipes for the Guokr town hall meeting
MAGIC III team members Pilu Giraudo, Nancy Kavazanjian and Dawn Scheier prepare recipes for the Guokr town hall meeting

The goal of the third Moms to China mission, which took place in early December, was for U.S. farm moms to engage with Chinese key opinion leaders (KOLs) to help build confidence in the safety and importance of biotechnology while highlighting how this technology can enhance sustainable food security. USSEC worked as part of the International Soy Growers Alliance (ISGA)on this mission.
Six KOLs from Sina Weibo (a Chinese microblog site) met with United Soybean Board (USB) director Nancy Kavazanjian, CommonGround volunteer Dawn Scheier, and Pilu Giraudo of Argentina. All six KOLs posted through their Weibo accounts after the meetings, covering GMO topics and promoting a scientific understanding of GMOs. One KOL created two Weibo posts, one before the meeting to collect questions from netizens and another after the meeting. She also wrote a blog article and posted it on her blogs at Sina and Netease. The impressions generated through both Weibo posts and blog articles by the six KOLs totaled around 600,000.
Forty-three people attended a town hall meeting at Guokr. The feedback from the audience at the event was quite positive with many posting photos and tweeting Guokr’s article in their WeChat, a Chinese mobile text and voice messaging communication service, accounts. Guokr posted the event announcement and the event summary through their website (Food Lab Channel), Food Lab Weibo and WeChat accounts. In total the impressions were around 100,000.
In terms of numbers of impressions, the Guokr event may not seem to be as impressive as the six Sina KOLs, however, many participants took photos of the dishes and the farm moms and shared among their WeChat friends’ circles. These impressions are not possible to be calculated but still have a significant impact among Chinese consumers.