by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“When they own food …
”
Jeffrey Smith with
U.S. Senator Tom Harkin
Makeda
Dr. Lori Robbins
Nick Barnaby
Tom Eden
Eva Roufé
Local activist Cathy
Mendonça (right) with other participants
The March
“Mankind will stop …
”
It might seem
strange that over 700 people would come out to the Balboa Park fountain on a
bright, sunny day, listen to speakers for over an hour, march all the way down
to Little Italy and then return to Balboa Park to listen to speakers for over
an hour again just to target one corporation. But Monsanto isn’t an ordinary
corporation. According to protesters, Monsanto’s dominance of the worldwide
seed industry, its aggressive promotion of genetically modified organisms (GMO’s)
and its legal strategy of forcing farmers to sign agreements to buy new seeds
every year instead of saving some for future planting indicate that the company
will stop at nothing until every atom of food consumed by humans everywhere on
earth is a proprietary Monsanto product.
“It’s easy to be
angry at Monsanto,” said Jeffrey Smith of the anti-GMO group Institute for
Responsible Technology, who addressed the afternoon rally from Denver via
Skype. “We can tell stories all day about why they’re the world’s most hated
corporation. Three of the Monsanto scientists who did the ‘safety’ studies on
rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone, used to get cows to give more milk,
which was linked to breast cancer and other human health hazards in some
studies) refused to drink milk afterwards, and one bought his own cow. We’ve
caught Monsanto doing research that hides problems with their products.
Monsanto withholds seeds from other scientists, and if the scientists get them
anyway from other sources, Monsanto goes after them in court.”
According to
Smith, Michael Taylor was an attorney for Monsanto when he got a job with the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where he signed the paper certifying
that foods containing GMO’s were chemically identical to foods without them.
“The overwhelming consensus of the scientists at the FDA was that [foods containing] GMO’s were different — and
dangerous,” Smith explained. Nonetheless, Taylor, an attorney with no
scientific background, made it official U.S. law that GMO’s were harmless and
therefore foods containing them didn’t have to be labeled as such. Taylor was
rewarded with a higher-paying job at Monsanto — and now he’s returned to the
FDA, newly appointed by President Obama to oversee all food-safety regulation.
“In 1999, a
Monsanto spokesperson said their goal was to make sure 100 percent of all the
world’s seeds came from them,” Smith said. “Their plan was to take over from
God. They want to genetically engineer all life and eliminate the products of
billions of years of evolution. So when we stand up against Monsanto we are
protecting all future generations. We cannot clean up all the self-propagating
genetic pollution already released by Monsanto. No ancestor of ours has ever
had the opportunity to do this much because no technology has ever been
long-lived than theirs.”
How could
Monsanto literally take over the entire human food supply? The process began in
1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court first ruled that life forms could be
patented. Monsanto got into the business of genetically engineered seeds to
protect their patented herbicide RoundUp, which they sold to farmers as a weed
killer. When the patents to RoundUp were about to expire in the 1990’s,
Monsanto hit on the strategy of genetically modifying soybeans and other crop
seeds so RoundUp wouldn’t affect them. But these so-called “RoundUp Ready”
seeds came with a catch: you could only use them if you signed a contract with
Monsanto saying you’d only use RoundUp with them — not a competing herbicide — and you had to buy your seeds anew from Monsanto each
year instead of saving seeds from your harvest for next year’s planting.
What’s more,
Monsanto’s legal department aggressively went after farmers whose crops
contained genes from Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds, whether the
farmers had deliberately planted Monsanto seeds or not. One victim was Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser,
interviewed by this reporter in 2001, who had spent over 20 years building up
seed lines of organically grown soybeans and rapeseeds (the source of canola
oil). Unfortunately for Schmeiser, one of his neighbors was a Monsanto
customer, and seeds containing Monsanto’s patented genes drifted over into
Schmeiser’s fields and cross-pollinated his plants. Monsanto sued him and won
when the Canadian court said it didn’t matter that Schmeiser hadn’t planted
Monsanto’s seeds or wanted their genes in his plants; as long as they were
there, no matter how they got there, he was violating Monsanto’s patents. As a
result, he not only had to pay Monsanto a hefty judgment, he also had to
destroy many of his laboriously bred seed lines.
With legal
precedents like that, Monsanto could conceivably take over the world’s entire
food supply and claim ownership of absolutely everything we eat or drink. All
they have to do is get enough GMO seeds of every food crop in distribution and
let nature do the rest for them. If they can demand royalties from every farmer
who grows a crop Monsanto makes a seed for, they will own not only every form
of edible plant life but every food animal as well — since many GMO crops,
including corn, are not only consumed by people directly but are fed to
livestock. The power Smith says Monsanto wants is not only to control evolution
in their laboratories, but to loose their patented genes on the world’s fields
so they incorporate themselves into every farmer’s crop — and thus every farmer
has to pay a royalty to Monsanto and no one can eat without enriching
Monsanto’s coffers.
One result of
Monsanto’s strategy that’s already affecting the world is an increase in
chronic diseases Smith and other GMO opponents think are associated with the
consumption of genetically modified foods. “Thousands of doctors are now
prescribing non-GMO diets, and their patients are getting better,” Smith said. Among
the health hazards of consuming GMO foods, Smith said, are allergies, asthma,
gastrointestinal problems, headaches, migraines, skin conditions, problems with
fertility, anxiety, depression, other mental issues, kidney disease,
hypertension and diabetes. (For more information on the health hazards of
consuming GMO’s, visit http://www.responsibletechnology.org/health-risks.)
So what is Smith
suggesting we do about GMO’s? The government isn’t going to solve the problem,
he said, not with Monsanto virtually owning the process that supposedly
“regulates” them. The answer, he said, is simply don’t buy them — and don’t
shop at stores that carry them. It’s because no one is forced to buy GMO’s — at
least so far, alternatives to most GMO products still exist in the marketplace
— that Monsanto and other companies invested in GMO’s are fighting tooth and
nail against laws that require that foods containing GMO’s be labeled as such.
In Europe, where products containing GMO’s do have to be labeled, major companies like Nestlé, Unilever, McDonald’s
and Bayer have stopped selling GMO products because no one will buy them.
It’s worked in
the United States, too, Smith said. Enough consumers became aware of the health
hazards of milk containing rBGH that they stopped buying it — and Walmart
stopped carrying it. Deprived of a market in the stores of the world’s largest
private corporation, dairies stopped using it. (Smith didn’t mention that a key
player in the story was Alta-Dena Dairy, which had to go to court to win the
right to label their milk as not
containing rBGH.) Though Smith and other anti-GMO activists lost a major battle
in California in 2012 — they put Proposition 37 on the ballot to require that foods
containing GMO’s be labeled, but a multi-million dollar corporate-funded
campaign and flaws in the initiative’s wording led to its defeat at the polls —
Smith said the Prop. 37 campaign brought the U.S. closer to a “tipping point”
at which people will demand non-GMO foods — and the major food companies and
grocery stores will have to comply.
Smith’s speech
was the final act of a nearly five-hour event that contained a rally in the
morning outside the fountain in Balboa Park, a march to the farmers’ market in
Little Italy, then back to the park for the afternoon program at the World Beat
Center. Makeda Cheatom, also known as Makeda Dread, founded the World Beat
Center in the 1970’s in one of two unused water towers in the park — the Centro
Cultural de la Raza is in the other — and both have faced ongoing battles with
the city ever since for the right to stay there. Makeda boasted that she
started San Diego’s first vegetarian restaurant, The Prophet, and at the World
Beat Center she offers classes on how to live entirely on raw foods.
Makeda talked
about how GMO seeds and foods are being “dumped” in Third World countries, how
activists there are fighting back and how we need to take them as an example.
“We have to get more First World people in this movement,” she said. “I don’t
want to have divisions between Black, white and Brown people. It’s all one
people, and y’all come from Africa anyway.”
San Diego State
University (SDSU) food sciences professor Dr. Lori Robbins spoke at the morning
rally at the fountain about Monsanto’s power in the political system and the
health hazards of glyphosate, the key active ingredient in RoundUp. “Why
doesn’t our government protect us?” she said. “Monsanto stuffs so much money
into the ears of our government that they can’t hear us. We’re paying with our
money, our lives and our future. That’s why we’re in the streets — so our
government can hear us. Maybe we need a new government.”
“Or no
government!” responded a member of the audience.
“Telling you
everything that’s bad about Monsanto in three minutes is impossible,” said Hugh
Moore of the Green Party of San Diego County. “There’s only one way this gets
into us: the government allows it. Internationally, the U.S. government is the
lobbying arm of Monsanto. When France decided not to let GMO’s into their
country, Monsanto sent the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, to
talk to the French government to try to get them to change their minds.” Moore
said that 270,000 farmers in India have committed suicide in the last 15 years
because they’ve gone broke due to Monsanto’s requirement that they buy new
seeds every year instead of saving them from previous plantings — as farmers
have been doing since agriculture existed.
“I want to talk
about the role of the media in activism and in the situation we’re in in this
country,” said Nick Barnaby, one of the organizers of the event. He and other
speakers talked about Section 735 from the Consolidated and Further Continuing
Appropriations Act of 2013, the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act.” Enacted by
Congress and signed into law by President Obama in March 2013 as part of one of
the big “compromise” budget bills, Section 735 allows Monsanto and other
companies that make GMO’s to keep manufacturing them even if they’re sued.
According to
Barnaby, the U.S. media are complicit in Monsanto’s takeover of the worldwide
food industry because they aren’t reporting on Section 735 and other issues
exposing the risks of GMO’s. “How many of you heard about the Monsanto
Protection Act on TV?” Barnaby said. “How many of you heard about this march on
TV? Nobody. … I found out about [Section 735] in December. We find these bills
and put together campaigns to stop them. If the TV would actually cover these
stories, it would be different.”
Barnaby said
that anti-GMO activists need both to grow their own food and start their own
media on the Internet. “This is just the start of the new food revolution,” he
said. “We have to network locally. We’re going to do a lot of activism,
including your Senators and Congressmembers. The other thing we need to do is
make real-time changes in our own lives. There are a lot of new techniques to
grow your own food. I’d like you to grow food and not lawns.”
A number of
speakers at both rallies are doing just that in various ways. Tom Eden gave a
pitch for aquaculture — a system of underwater farming in which plants and
marine animals live, nurture and sustain each other, creating consumable food
for humans. He also urged people to visit the Web site http://healthyfoodlocalearth.wordpress.com,
which offers help for would-be food growers in San Diego. Another speaker put
in a pitch for the Organic Consumers’ Association, http://www.organicconsumers.org,
which among other things is launching a worldwide campaign to ban nicotinoid
pesticides and Monsanto’s Mon810 genetically engineered corn, which have been
linked to the mass death of bees (see http://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/50865/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=8662).
At the afternoon
rally, Eva Roufé showed a PowerPoint presentation promoting an organically
grown vegetarian diet. “Organic food is more expensive,” she conceded, “but
it’s natural and it’s more nutrition-dense, which means you can eat less. And
the more we buy it, the more they’re going to grow it.” She offered tips for
storing vegetables, including soaking them in water to keep them fresh longer,
and said when you buy organic you can save your own seeds and use them to grow
your own food for next year.
Turner Bell of
City Farmers’ Nursery also offered advice for people interested in growing
their own. “You just need to keep clean and be aware of safety,” he said. “You
can find unique ways of doing things. Grow your own foods and learn to eat
seasonally. When you’re in the garden, you’re around a lot of oxygen-producing
plants. There’s a lot more to a garden than just food. Being in a garden is
stress-reducing. I am really blessed to be able to live and work in my garden,
to have fresh eggs and honey, and to be able to make my own olive oil.”
