by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Carrie Driscoll
Hugh Moore
Tanya Mack
“Sustainable Santa”
The Bronner brothers
Donna (right) says
“Occupy Monsanto!”
The bee die-in,
protesting the mass death of honeybee colonies because of pesticides made by
Monsanto and other giant corporations
“Monsanto Makes
Hitler Look Good”
The “Frankenfood”
Monster
Monsanto Owns the FDA
“Monsanto Kills”
“My children are not
lab rats!”
Over 200 people
gathered at the water fountain in Balboa Park Saturday afternoon, October 12
for the second major demonstration in five months targeting the Monsanto
Corporation. Featuring many of the same speakers who’d appeared at the previous
anti-Monsanto demonstration on May 25 in the same location, the opening rally
contrasted Monsanto’s vision of the future of agriculture — massive uses of Monsanto
pesticides over fields of a Monsanto-patented single variety of every sown
crop, genetically engineered by Monsanto researchers to resist Monsanto’s
chemicals, with every farmer in the world paying royalties each year and buying
only Monsanto-owned seeds — with the speakers’ preferred alternative. That is a
biologically diverse network of small farmers, growing on whatever land they
can use, planting different varieties of crops and saving seeds for reuse in
next year’s planting.
The opening
speakers — Ray, Michelle and Jennifer from Blue Sky San Diego — announced that
Monsanto had just bought a company called Climate Corporation for $1 billion.
Climate Corporation’s goal is to combat human-caused climate change with more
human-caused climate change. Specifically, according to the Blue Sky Project
spokespeople, Climate Corpiration is spraying “aluminum oxide and other toxic
chemicals” into clouds. From this, they said, the aluminum oxide would fall to
earth and some of it would settle in trees. “Trees containing aluminum catch
fire,” they explained. “We need to stop the geo-engineering projects. They will
contaminate the soil, and then we’ll have
to rely on Monsanto’s seeds.”
The speakers
generally portrayed a dark future in which Monsanto’s network of patent-protected
seeds and pesticides holds so total a grip on the world’s agriculture that
literally no one will be able to eat anything that doesn’t contain
Monsanto-owned genes. They quoted authorities as diverse as Thomas Jefferson
and Henry Kissinger saying that anyone who controls the food supply controls
the people. “Thank you for joining us in an action against the most evil
corporation in the world,” said an early speaker, a woman who was identified
only as Chris.
According to
Chris, over one million people participated in anti-Monsanto demonstrations
worldwide on May 25. Among their demands was repeal of the so-called “Monsanto
Protection Act,” officially known as the “Farmers’ Assurance Provision,” that
was slipped into a must-pass farm bill in June 2012 but — at least as of
October 12 — wasn’t contained in the Senate proposal that ended the government
shutdown. It basically said that Monsanto and other companies selling
genetically modified seeds could continue to do so even if a federal court reversed
the decision of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) approving them.
“"Essentially,
what that Monsanto Protection Act rider said is that even if a court were to
determine that a particular product might be harmful to human beings or harmful
to the environment, the Department of Agriculture could not stop the production
of that product once it is in the ground,” U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
told CNN last May 28. “So you have deregulated the GMO industry from court
oversight, which is really not what America is about.”
At the October
12 rally, Chris hailed the death (at least for now) of the Monsanto Protection
Act but warned, “The fight for our rights is not over until Monsanto’s GMO
seeds are gone. The food [containing Monsanto’s GMO’s] is being sold openly
without us knowing. Monsanto’s seeds are subsidized by the taxes we pay our
government. Many countries are passing laws against GMO’s — including, just
yesterday, Mexico. In California, Mendocino, Marin and Tulare Counties have
made it unlawful to propagate or grow GMO’s.” She called on the participants in
the protest to lobby the San Diego County Board of Supervisors to pass a
similar ban here.
Hugh Moore, an
activist and spokesperson for the Green Party of San Diego County, said, “The
bad news is the corporations own government.” He warned that even if the bill
to reopen the government and raise the U.S. debt ceiling doesn’t contain the
Monsanto Protection Act, the next farm bill to come out of Congress probably
will. “Back in May over two million people gathered in over 50 different
countries” to protest Monsanto, Moore reminded the crowd. “We need to keep this
pressure up. Seven highly-placed figures from Monsanto have been hired by the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA no longer works for you; it works
for Monsanto.”
Among the people
Moore cited were Margaret Miller, who as a Monsanto employee wrote the memo
asking the FDA to declare that genetically modified foods were safe — and then,
as an FDA staff member, was assigned to “review” and approve her own memo!
“You’re the start of the revolution,” Moore said, “but many people are still
supporting the Republican and Democratic parties. The Green Party at this point
is a protest vote.”
Moore said that
rather than electoral politics, “the first step is protesting and the second
step is civil disobedience: standing in the way of the machine.” Moore cited a
paper by self-proclaimed “ecosocialist” Chris Williams (International
Socialist Review, May 2013: http://isreview.org/issue/89/what-ecosocialism-and-how-do-we-get-there),
and endorsed the article’s call for a “System Change, Not Climate Change”
movement. “We have to move on from a government that works for the corporations
and works for capitalism,” Moore said.
Ned Barnaby,
self-described “anti-media” activist, reminded the audience that at the May 25
rally he’d given a report on how little coverage the mainstream corporate media
give to GMO’s in general or Monsanto in particular. “None of you heard of this
march on TV,” he said. “The mainstream media are in bed with Monsanto, just
like the government. If the media were covering this story, we wouldn’t have
former Monsanto executive Michael Taylor running the FDA and former Monsanto
attorney Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.”
Questioning how
“the same people who were trying to start a war in Syria two months ago now say
they don’t have the money to keep the government running.” Barnaby said, “We can’t
trust the government to regulate our food supply. We have to grow our own food.
The government gives people tickets for growing food and vegetables in their
front yards. We have to end this.”
The Positive
Alternative: Grow Your Own
Throughout the
85-minute rally there was this continual yin and yang, with some speakers
denouncing Monsanto and its cozy relationship with the government agencies
supposedly “regulating” it, and other speakers — sometimes the same ones —
urging people to opt out of the commercial food system, either by growing their
own or buying direct from farmers through so-called Community-Supported
Agriculture (CSA) programs.
“We can grow
food instead of lawns,” said Barnaby. “You can grow food inside your
apartment.” Barnaby particularly promoted a system called “aquaponics,” which
involves growing both food crops and fish in water-filled tanks. “It’s a
closed-loop system with living fish creating the fertilizer for your plants,”
he explained. “You can grow organic food and fish, and eat the fish as well.”
“I didn’t know
my grandfather was pulling seeds and feeding his family with the same varieties
his dad did,” said Carrie Driscoll of
the San Diego Seed Company. “That kind of life has been lost as we’ve moved to
cities and convenience has become the number one factor in how we feed
ourselves.” Driscoll was particularly critical of Monsanto and other giant seed
companies for reducing the number of different varieties of farm crops, to
promote an industrial model of agriculture in which farmers plant the same
variety year after year — and have to buy new seeds from Monsanto or its
competitors every year.
“The Potato
Famine and the Dust Bowl both occurred because of the lack of seed diversity,”
Driscoll said. “Because industrial agriculture has made many crops less
genetically diverse, I started San Diego Seed Company to bring back diversity
to San Diego.” One risk of losing genetic diversity and shifting to what’s
called “monoculture” — in which every seed for a particular crop is of the same
variety — is if a pest comes along that attacks that variety, there are no
other types of that crop to replace it. The Potato Famine was caused by a pest
that attacked the kind of potatoes Irish farmers were growing in 1846 — and it
ended when new varieties of potatoes were brought in from South America and
proved resistant to that pest.
Alicia Sachs
brought two large blue bins and held them up — they were empty — to demonstrate
what she gets from participation in Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA). CSA
is a system by which a group of consumers pay one or more farmers to grow crops
in advance, then get regular shipments from that farm, either delivered to
their homes, picked up at the farms, or picked up at farmers’ markets. But she
warned that some of the “farmers” who offer food for sale that way don’t farm
organically, and others are hustlers or con artists who don’t have farms at
all.
“You have to ask
where their farm is, and if you can visit it,” Sachs warned. “My first CSA
farmer was mostly fruits, and I wanted vegetables. The CSA I belong to now is
J. R. Organics. You can take a tour and see their compost pile. It doesn’t work
for everyone, but it works for me.” She also recommended shopping either at
farmers’ markets or at stores like the Ocean Beach People’s Food Co-Op. If you
buy food from CSA’s or other non-traditional sources, “you become a better
cook,” she said. “Sometimes I get stuff and I don’t know what it is, but if it
tastes good I can put it in juice or a smoothie. I can shell beans — and you
can’t be on your computer or make a phone call while you’re shelling beans.”
A man who
introduced himself as “Sustainable Santa” and came more or less dressed for the
part — he didn’t wear a long fake beard or a pointed hat but he did have a beard (a real one) and a red shirt — credited
his vegan wife with putting him on a healthier diet that helped him lose 75
pounds. “Leave an apple, not a cookie, for Santa, and tell him next time you
want to see 25 pounds less of him,” he said. “The guy who’s a role model for
kids should not be someone who looks like Rush Limbaugh.”
“I am living
proof that any and all diseases can be cured by working with nature,” said
Susan McKenzie. “Life has been around for billions of years. Its intelligence
knows what works for our bodies and what doesn’t. Our body is programmed to
work best on natural food. Fifty years ago, we didn’t have ‘organic’ food. All food was ‘organic.’ Have we forgotten we are raw,
living organic beings, too? Everything we put in our bodies either feeds or
fights life. Unnatural substances in our bodies cause stress. Our immune system
responds to them as if they’re foreign invaders. We are beings whose bodies are
at war with themselves. These chemicals just make things worse.”
One Woman’s Toxic Story
Tanya Mack knows
all about a body being at war with itself. Hers has been at war with itself
since she was born. Her father was a Viet Nam War veteran who had been in
charge of dispersing Agent Orange — a combination of two herbicides, 2, 4-D and
2, 4, 5-T, one made by Dow Chemical and one by, you guessed it, Monsanto — over
Viet Nam. It was part of U.S. war strategy to starve the opposition as well as
destroying the rain forest in which enemy fighters hid. Her presentation was a
litany of medical horrors she’s dealt with all her life, including four total
and 15 partial hip replacements and a series of cancers, including a
particularly terrifying one called “multiple squamous-cell carcinomas.”
There are, Mack
explained, only two ways you get the sort of cell mutation that gives you
multiple squamous-cell carcinomas. One is by inheritance; the other is by
exposure to toxic chemicals, either personally or via your parents. “There is
no history of these cancers in my family,” Mack recalled. So her doctors sent
her to UCLA for genetic tests — and they found that she had a brand new cancer
mutation most likely caused by her dad’s exposure to Agent Orange in Viet Nam.
“In 2010 I was
diagnosed with melanoma,” Mack said. “I was fortunate in that it was caught
early, before it spread to my lymph nodes. In 2011 I was diagnosed with another
cancer, one caused by arsenic, which makes up 35 percent of Agent Orange. In
2012 I had to have my gall bladder removed.” That year she was also put on a
clinical trial for a new cancer drug. The good news was that the drug worked:
it brought all her cancers under control. The bad news was that once the FDA
approved the drug, she could no longer get it for free as she had during the
trial. Now it costs over $12,000 per month — and she can’t afford it.
“So for the last
five months, I have had my cancers return,” she said. “I have had 282 biopsies,
of which 189 were positive for cancer. My medical needs have hurt my family,
both physically and psychologically. In 2009 I applied to the Veterans’
Administration (VA) for care and was denied because my biological mother had
not served in Viet Nam. In 2010 my father died at 100 percent disability.”
Mack explained
that children of women who served in Viet Nam can get coverage for cancer, but the
only disabilities the government recognizes for the children of male Viet Nam veterans are two types of spina bifida.
Why? Pure economics, Mack said; 2.8 million American men served in Viet Nam, as
opposed to just 8,000 women — and if the government were to open the floodgates
of VA coverage to the children of male Viet Nam vets their expenses would go through the roof.
“During Viet Nam
servicemembers were told that Agent Orange was safe,” Mack recalled. “They did
not wear protection when they handled or applied it. There was even a press
conference where a scientist said you could drink it. An estimated 19 million
gallons were used in Viet Nam during the war.” The U.S. military stopped using
Agent Orange in Viet Nam in 1971, but it’s been the gift that keeps on giving
not only for children of American Viet Nam vets but for the Viet Namese as
well. “Children in Viet Nam are still
being born with [Agent Orange-related] birth defects,” Mack explained. “The
U.S. government did not admit Agent Orange had health effects until 1995, and
they refuse to do research that could show damage to children and
grandchildren.”
What Else You Can Do
Michael and
David Bronner talked up a campaign to pass a citizens’ initiative, I-522, in
Washington state to require that foods with genetically modified ingredients be
labeled. A similar bill, Proposition 37, went down to a narrow two-point defeat
in California in November 2012 after what the Bronners called “junk-food
manufacturers and pesticide manufacturers” funded a $47 million campaign
against it. “If GMO’s are labeled up there, they’ll be labeled down here,”
Michael Bronner said.
“American
farmers need to get off this pesticide-GMO treadmill,” David Bronner added.
“Americans need to wake up to the secret changes the chemical industry are
making in our food, and demand food labeling. As soon as we get that right,
most people are going to say maybe I’m not
going to have the genetically engineered tofu. That’s what happened in Europe.
They didn’t ban it; they labeled it, and the market evaporated. This is why
[the industries] is fighting us. … They’ve got $17 million already because
they’re desperate. They know if a state like Washington goes, the sky’s not
going to fall, prices aren’t going to go up, and we’re going to have national
labeling.”
The Bronners
urged people to visit the I-522 campaign Web site, http://yeson522.com/, for information and
volunteer opportunities. They also promoted the http://occupy-monsanto.com/ site through
which the international anti-Monsanto actions October 12, of which the San
Diego event was a part, were organized, and recommended that people view the
video on http://occupy-monsanto.com/
of what they called the “Monsanto’s Minions Awards,” a mock ceremony on October
10 in which activists presented phony “awards” to Congressmembers especially
friendly to Monsanto.
Chris, who had
spoken earlier in the event, came out again after the Bronners’ presentation.
“If we label GMO’s, who’s going to buy them?” she said. “Those who can’t afford
organic food are going to be forced to buy GMO’s. I say ban them! If there are
countries around the world that are banning GMO’s, then why are they legal
here? Monsanto had its chance to label GMO’s. Right now we should aim for the
sky and protect nature, because nature doesn’t have a voice.”
