by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Nomi Carmona of “Babes
Against Biotech”
The banner protesting
the Kaua’i lawsuit (Nomi at left)
Protesters confront
biotechies (Hendrik Jan Houthoff at right)
Chris Galloway
GMO’s = death (the
banner Chris Galloway objected to is at right)
“Kill Monsanto Before
It Kills Us”
“Monsanto Owns the
FDA”
Mom and three kids
came down from Temecula to protest
The
demonstration against the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s (BIO) 2014
convention in San Diego June 23-26 was small. A hastily thrown-together action
outside the San Diego Convention Center on BIO’s last day in town, June 26,
attracted no more than about 20 people at any one time. But among those people
were a delegation of activists from Hawai’i, which has become an unlikely
ground zero in the battles over pesticides, genetically engineered crops and
the future of farming in the U.S. and worldwide.
Led by Nomi
Carmona, a Hawai’ian activist and president of Babes Against Biotech (BAB), the
Hawai’ians particularly targeted three pesticide companies — Syngenta, Dow
Chemical and DuPont Pioneer — for a lawsuit they’ve filed against the county
government of Kaua’i, one of the Hawai’ian Islands. The suit, filed last
January in federal court in Honolulu, seeks to throw out a law opponents of
pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) got through the Kaua’i
county government in 2013 limiting the use of pesticides and GMO’s in
experimental farms on Kaua’i.
According to
Carmona, all six of the world’s major agricultural and chemical biotech firms —
the three that are suing plus Monsanto, Bayer, and BASF — operate experimental
farms on four of the five Hawai’ian Islands. “We passed a law to require buffer
zones between the farms and schools, homes and hospitals, because we’re getting
so many problems with pesticide poisoning,” Carmona explained. “The kids are
having to leave school in ambulances, unconscious. Pesticides are being found
drifting off the test fields and ending up next to schools. Pediatricians are
freaking out because we’re showing 10 times the national average of birth
defects in the neighboring fields.”
In addition to
setting up buffer zones between experimental farms and residents, Carmona
explained, “That bill also required disclosure of what they’re spraying on us
and what genetic traits they’re experimenting with [in creating GMO’s], and to
do environmental and health impact studies.” Getting the bill approved by the
Kaua’i legislature was itself a tough struggle — Kaua’i Mayor Bernard Carvalho,
Jr. vetoed it and the Kaua’i County Counsel passed it over his veto in November
2013 — and with the companies suing to have it invalidated, it’s become even
tougher.
Why are the
companies suing? Syngenta spokesperson Paul Minehart said in an interview that
the ordinance is illegal because “it arbitrarily targets our industry with
burdensome and baseless restrictions on farming operations by attempting to
regulate activities over which counties in Hawai’i have no jurisdiction. These
activities are already regulated by governmental agencies under state and
federal laws.”
One thing the
companies and the activists agree on is why Hawai’i in general, and Kaua’i in
particular, have become ground zero for research in pesticides and the GMO
crops designed to withstand them. Because Hawai’i is America’s only tropical
state, it has an excellent growing climate and can generate three to four crop
cycles per year — compared to only one or two on the U.S. mainland. And because
it’s made up of five islands, the test fields for pesticides and GMO’s can be
kept relatively isolated and free from cross-contamination with other forms of
agriculture.
As a result,
Syngenta and DuPont Pioneer each leased about 5,000 acres of land on Kaua’i,
and Dow subsidiary Agrigenetics leased 3,500 acres. The companies use this land
to grow a mix of GMO crops, including corn, soybeans, canola (rapeseed) and
rice. The lawsuit states that Kaua’i’s climate gives the companies “the
invaluable opportunity to triple or quadruple the pace of development of GMO
crops,” which is “crucial” to their success.
That’s exactly
what Hawai’i’s environmental and anti-GMO activists are trying to stop. In
addition to Kaua’i, the government of Mau’i is considering a similar bill and
the local government of Hawai’i, the largest of the islands and colloquially
called “the Big Island” by locals so it isn’t confused with the entire state,
just passed a bill banning the growing of any new GMO crops on their land.
Supporters of these ordinances say the companies are using pesticides other
nations have banned, and that they’re spraying restricted-use pesticides 10 to
16 times per day, 250 to 300 days per year.
According to
Carmona, one reason she was protesting the BIO convention is that BIO itself
has filed a lawsuit against the Big Island’s law restricting GMO crops.
“Hawai’i is the last [island] without the chemical companies,” she said. “We’re
protecting it by passing that law, and this organization is now suing to
overturn it.”
Carmona said the
companies agreed to voluntary disclosure under something called the Kaua’i Good
Neighbor Project, but the “absolutely astonishing numbers” revealed in those
releases led the companies to pull back and fight tooth and nail against any
requirements for additional disclosure. She said the only way grass-roots
activists know what chemicals are being sprayed is from the sales records for
them, which are supposed to be posted online — but the online information is
not complete, and “they’re legally fighting that, too.”
The tale of woe
being told by Nomi Carmona has a familiar ring to progressive San Diegans still
reeling from the defeat of the Barrio Logan Community Plan at the polls earlier
in June. There, too, local activists had sought to set up buffer zones between
toxic industries and people’s homes and schools. They won at the San Diego City
Council, but industry fought back by putting the community plan up for a public
vote by the entire city — and the plan was defeated by a 20-point margin. The
campaign against it claimed that passage of the Community Plan would push the
Navy out of San Diego, close the shipyards and cost the city 45,000 jobs.
Those are the
same arguments Carmona hears when she debates the pesticide/GMO issue back home
on Kaua’i. “I could give you their entire testimony,” she said. “Every time
it’s always the same thing: ‘We provide jobs. We provide a valuable service.
Over three trillion GMO meals have been served.’” She also said company
spokespeople tell elected officials and ordinary citizens to “ignore all the
other peer-reviewed science in the entire world, and just listen to the
‘science’ that they fund,” which says
GMO’s are safe.
The biotech
industry’s take-no-prisoners attitude towards its critics has allowed the food,
chemical and pesticide industries to sneak GMO’s into Americans’ food with
virtually no public debate. Elsewhere in the world, that hasn’t been the case.
France, Germany and almost all other European countries have passed laws
requiring that food containing GMO ingredients be labeled as such. “All we want
are the kinds of laws your countries already have,” some of the anti-BIO
protesters told convention delegates from Europe.
But U.S.
industry leaders have raised millions of dollars to defeat ballot measures in
California and Washington requiring foods containing GMO’s to be labeled. And
they’re threatening a lawsuit against the state of Vermont for passing a
labeling bill in their state legislature.
A Difference of 13 Years
The relative
absence of organized protest to the 2014 BIO convention in San Diego — an event
extensively ballyhooed in the local media because Hillary Rodham Clinton came
to town to deliver the keynote speech — stood in stark contrast to what
happened the first time BIO came to town. In the summer of 2001, opponents of
biotechnology in general and GMO’s in particular organized an elaborate
response, including hosting their own “Biojustice” convention two days before
BIO’s opened and bringing in worldwide speakers, including Vandana Shiva from
India and Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, whom Monsanto sued for patent
infringement — and won — after their genetically modified canola seeds
contaminated his crop. Opponents also tried to set up an elaborate series of
street actions during the BIO convention itself.
Unfortunately,
the San Diego police and business establishment were ready for them. Partly to
ward off a riot similar to the one in Seattle in November-December 1999 at the
World Trade Organization’s ministerial meetings, and partly to show the biotech
industry that the city was on their side, the police mounted a massive
presence, closing off much of downtown San Diego. Police also aggressively
enforced traffic laws — including arresting people for stepping outside
crosswalk lines when crossing streets — to lock up as many protesters as
possible and discourage those left free.
The Centre City
Development Corporation (CCDC), the now-defunct redevelopment agency for
downtown San Diego, organized meetings of local property owners to make sure
nobody rented temporary space to host anti-BIO demonstrations. As a result, the
Biojustice organizers had to set up their “convergence center” miles away from
the convention, in the parking lot of an alternative church in Golden Hill. The
quasi-military tactics of the police put off not only Biojustice protesters but
BIO delegates as well. Chris Holloway of the ERA Consulting Group in London
attended both the 2001 and 2014 BIO conventions and was astounded that in 2001
he couldn’t get anywhere near the Convention Center without showing his
delegate badge.
At least one
activist who participated in Biojustice suggested that the heavy-handed police
response to the 2001 anti-BIO protests discouraged local activists from
mounting major challenges to later BIO conventions in San Diego. This may be
why activists have paid so little attention to BIO in a city where the three
Marches Against Monsanto in May and October 2013 and May 2014 have drawn large
crowds. The last March Against Monsanto on May 24 drew over 3,000 people and
featured a pre-march rally of local speakers urging anti-GMO activists to
support community gardens, farmers’ markets and other alternative ways of
obtaining freshly grown, organic and non-GMO food.
The relatively
tiny size of the anti-BIO demonstration June 26 had one unforeseen result:
protesters got to talk to BIO delegates one-on-one and found a number of them
surprisingly sympathetic to their cause. Chris Holloway took exception to a
sign that said “GMO’s = ” with a drawing of a skull and crossbones. But he told
protesters he agreed with their opposition to GMO’s in agriculture. His concern
was that medical researchers like himself be allowed to use genetic engineering
to develop treatments for hereditary diseases. Holloway told protesters about
the elaborate precautions medical GMO researchers take to ensure their GMO’s don’t contaminate the environment, including
destroying all waste products excreted by their human research subjects — a far
cry from the notoriously sloppy practices of agricultural GMO researchers.
In general, BIO
delegates from other countries — including most of western Europe, where GMO’s
are either banned outright or there are labeling requirements for foods
containing them — were more sympathetic to the protesters’ cause than
Americans. Hendrik Jan Houthoff, a delegate from LINXIS in Amsterdam, drew the
same distinction as Holloway between medical and agricultural biotech research.
“The way Monsanto does it doesn’t help mankind,” Houthoff said. He added that
his daughter, who does biological agricultural work in France, is even more
anti-Monsanto than he is.
Asked why his
daughter doesn’t like Monsanto, Houthoff said, “Because they are using methods
of agriculture that kill diversity in nature, that kill insects, and that don’t
help farmers because they have to buy [seeds] from Monsanto every year.” Some
of the demonstrators were astonished to hear a BIO convention delegate
essentially repeating their talking points and attributing them to his own
daughter.
Nomi Carmona did
get into an argument with an African-American graduate student in biotech who
conceded that “it is a legitimate concern when you’re talking about how people
get food when it’s not grown in their area.” But the grad student basically
took the industry’s point of view that GMO’s should be assumed to be safe and
the burden of proof should be on those who want them banned to prove that they
aren’t. “If you’re going to make an argument, there have to be a lot of facts
with it,” she said.
“We can’t have
the facts without the testing being done,” Carmona replied. “We’re not allowed
to.”
The grad
student, who had been in the auditorium when Hillary Clinton gave the keynote
speech, asked Carmona, “If you remove GMO’s, what is the alternative to feeding
the American population?”
It’s an argument
that particularly incenses Carmona. “It’s a fantasy right now that GMO’s will
help ‘feed the world,’” she told Zenger’s.
“Spending $46 million[1]
fighting labeling and disclosure of genetically engineered ingredients in your
food in California is not ‘feeding the world.’ Denying and crucifying
scientists like Tyrone Hayes for exposing the major health risks associated
with Syngenta’s [pesticide] atrazine is not ‘feeding the world.’ Everything
they’re doing, they’ve made a lot of promises and nothing’s come out. Where are
the increased crop yields? They don’t exist.”
[1] — A Huffington Post article, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/26/prop-37-opponents_n_2023719.html,
published October 26, 2012, revealed that food and chemical companies had
contributed nearly $30 million to defeat Proposition 37, which would have
required labeling of foods containing GMO’s in California. This doesn’t count
what was spent in the last week before the election, which could have brought
the total closer to the $46 million Carmona claimed.
