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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] It's About the Food
  • Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 11:56:12 -0600


It's About the Food
By Chef Kurt Michael Friese
(C) April 2005
Of Suicide Genes and Speaking Truth to Power

Our rights were reduced a little more last month.

The Iowa Legislature voted to support House File 642, which prohibits local
communities from banning genetically modified seed, and sent it off to the
Biotech industry's hip pocket where Governor Vilsack signed it into law.
Here's what happened and how.

In far-flung places like Vermont and California, organic farmers and other
concerned citizens began to notice that their state and federal governments
were doing little, or nothing, to protect them from the onslaught of
Monsanto, et al, and their GMOs (genetically modified organisms). So, they
turned, in droves, to local legislation to ban or otherwise control the use
of GMO seed in their towns and counties. The idea caught on and started
sweeping the nation through the loose-knit network that is the organic
movement.

This in turn pinned back the ears of the Biotech industry, because goodness
knows we wouldn't want to impinge on any of their profits. So they saddled
up their lobbyists and sent posses to statehouses throughout the country.
Now these lobbyists are well paid, well educated, well dressed
professionals
and are quite adept at influencing politicians to focus on the buttered
side
off the bread. Iowa is now the ninth state to succumb to their
irresistible
powers of persuasion. Identical bills are pending all over the country.

Some of you are not organic farmers and might be asking yourself, "so
what?"
Well, here's the problem: the Biotech industry's GMOs are designed for
monoculture; drastic simplification of the agricultural system to put
quantity and profit above quality and nutrition. These seeds are often
designed to produce sterile offspring (using so-called "suicide genes").
Even if the seeds are able to reproduce, it's against the law to save them.


Nature prefers biological diversity, and will adapt in often-severe ways to
correct the ecosystem in favor of diversity (witness the dust bowl). The
result of GMO monoculture is too much of a bad thing. And it isn't the
farmers of those cornfields that surround our fair city who are making the
profits. Ask any of them and they'll tell you that the federal subsidies
almost make them break even. Those profits are going to the GMO seed
companies; they hold patents on their seed, and on the DNA in them.

That's where the organic farmers get fired up. Biotech's right to swing
its
arms ends at the tip of the organic farmer's nose. If a truck carrying GMO
grain drives past your organic farm, a lot of that pollen is going to wind
up in your field. It also gets there by way of the butterflies, bees, and
on the wind. Then, not only is your crop no longer organic, but also if
you
save that seed to plant the next season, even unwittingly, then you stand
in
violation of Monsanto's patent rights and you'll have to pay for it,
dearly.
Similar problems arise from chemical drift, wherein ammonium nitrate and
herbicides drift across the road from the GM farm to the organic one.

All this is why many communities have passed ordinances controlling or
banning the use of GMO seed. Now, in Iowa, we can't do that. Rep. Mark
Kuhn (D-Floyd) called the bill "an attempt to legislate by and for the
biotechnology industry," and Rep. John Whitaker (D-Van Buren) agreed,
saying
it was a further erosion of local control over controversial agricultural
practices that raise health and environmental concerns. Our own Joe Bolkom
(D-Iowa City) stood with them, calling this "a bill in search of a problem"
because no localities are presently pursuing the sort of regulation this
bill prohibits. But sadly, the majority put their campaign financing ahead
of their constituents rights and health, again.






  • [Livingontheland] It's About the Food, Tradingpost, 04/20/2005

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