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market-farming - Re: UPDATE! Future of Our Food and Farms Summit

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  • From: "Del Williams" <delannw AT dlogue.net>
  • To: "market farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: UPDATE! Future of Our Food and Farms Summit
  • Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 13:00:57 -0600


I appreciate the idea that the organizers wanted to have a pro and con forum
to discuss the GMO issue. However, having Dennis Avery involved in this
forum is a little bit like inviting the Ku Klux Klan to an NAACP conference
to discuss integration issues.

I have a huge file on Dennis Avery, the Hudson Institute and various
organizations with the GMO/anti-organic agenda. I've attended Farm Bureau
and extension presentations on the GMO controversy and rarely found a
balanced discussion. Forget organic growers. We just get scolding looks
and snickers.

In a world of honorable people, Dennis Avery would have no home. He will
only seek to humiliate the other participants with twisted facts. I believe
he knowingly misused the 1995 CDC data to support his conclusion that
organic food is dangerous. Those data warranted an entirely different
conclusion. Thanks to that nonsense, I answered those questions all summer
long at the farmers' market in Kankakee, IL.

When he says "sustainable agriculture" it doesn't mean the same thing it
probably does to most people on this forum. Meanings are in people, their
agendas, and their experiences. Dennis A. gets paid very well for his
constructed approach to sustainable agriculture.

In my non-agricultural life I do statistical analysis for a variety of
organizations. He twisted the CDC numbers in the worst way to support his
unsupportable conclusions. An honest analysis would have pointed out - in
that year - that the people most at risk for e coli contamination were
children and geriatric residents in institutional care. Instead he focussed
on one lettuce grower in one year. Thanks. Destroy an entire industry
because of one grower.

He really did write a book on how the world has been saved with pesticides
and plastics. It's like a Saturday Night Live skit. Except you can't
laugh.

The best reason to attend this summit conference is to yell loud and clear
that we want the FDA to shut down GMO seed production and GMO crop
production for wholesale animal and human consumption until proper safety
tests have been conducted. Well, there's an idea. Maybe we should organize
a media event to expose this nut.

But, you know what? don't believe me. I am just one little organic grower
in central Illinois...who happens to know a few things about statistical
analysis. You should see my growing records... I have to laugh at my own
obsession in the detail. Please, go to the Hudson Institute's website and
order Dennis' book.

Del Williams
Farmer in the Del
Clifton, IL






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