Corporate Kneebiters
World According to Monsanto, pt 10, Taking Over
Published July 09, 2009 @ 07:43AM PT
This last episode of the documentary covers the GMO-mediated takeover of South American farmland, replacing small, diverse farms with a desert of genetically engineered soybeans that will be fed mainly to livestock in wealthier nations.
But, but, but ... we need to feed the world, right? Yes. And there are much better ways to do that.
Dr. Doug Gurian-Sherman, an expert in genetic engineering, explains as much in an interview at The Ethicurean.
First, he explains the difference between types of yield. There's intrinsic yield increase, higher food production capacity mediated by the genes and environmental interactions of the plant. Then, there's operational yield increase, where losses from pests and weed competition are cut, therefore boosting net yield.
Gurian-Sherman worked on the Union of Concerned Scientists' report demonstrating only very slight operational yield increases due to the introduction of GMO crops in the US. But they don't have any traits on the market that can increase intrinsic yield. He explains the problem with trying to do that, specifically recent obstacles to realizing the company's claim that they can 'get more out of every raindrop':
... In the report we cover an interesting case. One problem with some drought-tolerant crop varieties is that under normal moisture conditions, the variety doesn’t yield as well as varieties without drought tolerance. The New York Times recently covered a potential breakthrough with a particular gene that reportedly conferred drought tolerance but didn’t show that downside. But then a few months later, another lab working on the gene for different reasons found that it made plants more susceptible to various plant diseases. So the same gene that confers drought tolerance makes plants more susceptible to disease. Farmers may have to use pesticides to control these diseases if this drought tolerance gene is approved. How will this balance out in terms of benefit and risk?
Such unintended effects are not publicized because companies don’t like to talk about failures. The bottom line is that there has been a huge amount of effort to produce a lot of crops over the years with success of only a few traits: Bt and herbicide tolerance. They have not resulted in significant yield gains at all in the U.S. And we also have to put any yield gains in the context of the expense and other factors and compare GE technology to other technologies and production methods. ...
Gurian-Sherman also details more of the things that can go wrong when trying to boost yield through adjusting complex, multi-variable traits. There are often unintended consequences, such as the increased lignin production in the cell walls of Bt corn plants. Lignin isn't harmful, to my knowledge, but it's not edible either to us or the majority of microorganisms, so it would probably take longer to break down.
What would the effects be of having corn residue that's less digestible to the soil microfauna? I don't know, though it could conceivably reduce biodiversity and the available food supply for communities of organisms that make soil healthy. It might considerably alter the makeup of soil ecosystems by favoring different microbes, or not have any effects.
Though it would be nice if we could know for sure. Especially nice if our food was labeled so that we knew if we were participating in the experiment.
Mike Taylor for Food Safety Coordinator
Published July 02, 2009 @ 09:59PM PT
Obama's considering appointing a former Monsanto vice president, Mike Taylor, to head the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.
As Jill Richardson writes at LaVidaLocavore at the link above, Taylor thinks the FDA wastes too much time on food safety inspections at meat packing plants. Further, he believes that one of their main problems is that they have to slow down their line speed too much.
Everyone who's read anything about the horrendous working conditions at US meatpacking plants knows that incomplete kills before slaughter and worker injuries increase dramatically when line speeds increase.
As also noted at the Ethicurean, Taylor is the reason milk from rBGH/rBST cows doesn't have to be labeled. Bovine growth hormone is perfectly safe, after all. Except for cows, or humans who drink its breakdown products in milk.
So yes, Mike Taylor is the person we have to thank for putting pus from mastitis-infected cows into the milk supply, and exposing milk-drinking Americans by the millions to greater cancer risks.
This guy is heading up a food safety working group.
I'm just swimming in the changeiness.
World According to Monsanto, pt 9, Contamination
Published July 02, 2009 @ 08:30AM PT
A traditional Mexican corn farmer speaks in this portion of the "World According to Monsanto" documentary about the transgenic corn conquest of the ancient home of corn and the center of its greatest biodiversity: "... If they succeed, we'll be dependent on multinationals. We'll be forced to buy the fertilizer and insecticides they sell, because without them, their corn won't grow. Whereas the local corn grows very well without fertilizer or herbicide. Look at it, it's very beautiful. ..."
Now that NAFTA has made import controls on artificially cheap US corn difficult, and as much US corn contains transgenic traits, it's been impossible to keep contamination of this wind-pollinated plant at bay. Even in fields where farmers have been saving their own seed and sharing only with neighbors who do the same for centuries.
Robyn O'Brien: The Unhealthy Truth
Published June 30, 2009 @ 12:00AM PT
I can't call in queer to work today, they don't excuse you for that kind of thing around here, but hopefully I can plead wedding madness in re my brevity of posting. I'm sure at least Robert Wager misses me ;)
Anyway, go read Civil Eats, where Naomi Starkman has interviewed Robyn O'Brien, author of "The Unhealthy Truth," and explainer of why we a) don't need biotech to feed the world and b) would really like to know what we're eating.
You could also check out Jill Richardson's sampler platter of food news. You know you'll like it.
Total(ish) Recall
Published June 28, 2009 @ 11:55PM PT
ObamaFoodorama discusses the ineffectual food safety measure known as a voluntary recall. LaVidaLocavore has more on the food inspection details
The FDA can't even make food processing plants show them their customer complaint records, their pest control records, or their contamination control plans. Let's contrast that toothlessnes towards large corporations with the micromanagement the federal government is trying to impose on individual ranchers in the form of the National Animal ID System.
... Mr. [Jay Platt, the third-generation proprietor of Platt Ranch,] called the extra $2 cost of the electronic tags an onerous burden for a teetering industry and said he often moved horses and some of his 1,000 head of cattle among three ranches here and in Arizona. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person, who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities, Mr. Platt said. And there is no Internet connection on the ranch for filing to a regional database.
... “My main beef is that these proposed rules were developed by people sitting in their offices with no real knowledge of animal husbandry and small farms,” said Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms in Snow Hill, N.C., which rotates sheep, cattle, pigs, turkeys and chickens among three properties and sells directly to consumers and co-ops.
“I feel these regulations are draconian,” Ms. Pridgen said, “and that lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture.” ...
Why would the FDA have virtually no power to compel the food production and distribution industries to prevent people from dying of E. coli contamination, all while it's on the verge of having draconian authority over every aspect of animal movement on small farms and ranches?
Consider it a map of public power - Nestlé has it, Platt and Pridgen don't. It's obvious whose side the government is on.
World According to Monsanto, pt 8, Control
Published June 27, 2009 @ 08:58AM PT
This installment starts off talking to a pair of Indian cotton farmers explaining that not only does Monsanto's Bt cotton still need to be sprayed, they can no longer find non-Bt cotton to buy. The narrator sums up:
"Today in India, Monsanto controls nearly all of the cotton seed market, forcing the locals to buy its seeds at prices four times higher than conventional varieties. Small farmers must turn to money lenders, who charge high interest rates. If the harvest is poor, it means bankruptcy."
The entire microcredit movement, started by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, tried to fix the exploitive finance infrastructure available to the poor, who tend not to have collateral or cash reserves that traditional banks are interested in. Yet even microcredit has run into trouble, as noted at Yunus' website:
BALI, July 28 - In an effort to head off a potential crisis in the fast-expanding microfinance industry, its leaders are adopting global truth-in-lending standards and creating a system for comparing loan terms offered by competing lenders. To manage the effort, a new self-monitoring organization, MicroFinance Transparency, is being set up as the industry's policeman. The goal is to prevent companies from taking advantage of poor people with high interest rates and misleading credit offers.
The initiative was announced on July 28 at a microcredit conference in Bali by Chuck Waterfield, a professor at Columbia University who spearheaded the initiative, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who launched the microcredit revolution in Bangladesh 30 years ago with his Grameen Bank. "Microfinance emerged as a struggle against loan sharks, so we don't want to see new loan sharks created in the name of microcredit," Yunus tells BusinessWeek.
If the industry doesn't curtail abuses and confusion, it faces the prospect of government crackdowns and donor funds drying up. Since Yunus pioneered the idea of lending small amounts of money to poor people without demanding collateral, the phenomenon has spread worldwide. These days, thousands of organizations are making loans to tens of millions of borrowers—usually to help them set up or expand small businesses. ...
As the video segment goes on to note, the introduction of patented seeds sent farmer suicide numbers way up. In an interview with Navdanya founder, Vandana Shiva, she points out that the biotech firms are looking to introduce patented genes into all the seeds they sell, getting everyone used to the idea that companies can have total control over the food supply.
Shiva says, I believe rightly, that control over the food supply is more powerful than guns.
The global poor, who also grow quite a bit of its food, are squeezed by both finance systems that abandon them to loan sharks and corporations who want to be able to charge every year for what farmers used to be able (at least sometimes, if they wanted or needed) to provide for themselves.
I don't even have to stretch my imagination to posit some dire result. The suicide rate among Indian farmers has already increased dramatically.
In response, Monsanto has a very cheery and inclusive mission statement. But you know what they say about good intentions.
Biotech On Trial
Published June 24, 2009 @ 11:56PM PT
So a court has once again ruled against GE/GMO alfalfa. Jill Richardson writes:
Two years ago, a district court ruled that the USDA did not do its homework before approving genetically engineered alfalfa. The USDA approved GE alfalfa without a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which the court ruled was a violation of U.S. law. Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court upheld that decision and its resulting ban on GE alfalfa (pending a full EIS).
... Following that decision, Monsanto Company and Forage Genetics (who entered into the suit as Defendant-Intervenors) requested the appellate court to rehear the case. The news today is that the court denied their request and thus reaffirmed the earlier decision in full. ...
There were the findings in that first alfalfa case, as reported by the Center for Food Safety:
* The judge found that plaintiffs' concerns that Roundup Ready alfalfa will contaminate natural and organic alfalfa are valid, stating that USDA's opposing arguments were "not convincing" and do not demonstrate the "hard look" required by federal environmental laws. The ruling went on to note that "&For those farmers who choose to grow non-genetically engineered alfalfa, the possibility that their crops will be infected with the engineered gene is tantamount to the elimination of all alfalfa; they cannot grow their chosen crop."
* USDA argued that, based on a legal technicality, the agency did not have to address the economic risks to organic and conventional growers whose alfalfa crop could be contaminated by Monsanto's GE variety. But the judge found that USDA "overstates the law." ...
Shorter version: A federal judge ruled that crop contamination by genetically engineered foods is a serious problem and the pro-Monsanto USDA argued that it shouldn't matter.
Anyone making the stupid argument that contamination doesn't happen? No. Because the discussion happened in a federal court and there, as opposed to the venue provided by the comments of this blog, you can go to jail for lying.
You may have noticed that the particular breed they were talking about was Roundup Ready, a spin off of their many popular Roundup/glyphosate-resistant crops. Glyphosate seems, according to data accepted by government regulators, to be safer for humans and animals than other pesticides.
However, as I noted not too long ago, pure glyphosate isn't sprayed on crops. It's mixed with ingredients that, because they aren't directly responsible for the desired effect of killing plants, don't have to be listed on the label because they can legally be described as inert, or in other words, as having no effect.
Glyphosate is supposed to be safer for aquatic organisms because it tends to settle out of water in its pure form, but it's commonly mixed with chemicals whose sole purpose is to make it more water soluble, in which case it appears to be a hazard to aquatic life. As for the effects of Roundup's 'inert' ingredients on humans:
Used in yards, farms and parks throughout the world, Roundup has long been a top-selling weed killer. But now researchers have found that one of Roundup's inert ingredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. ...
Surprise!
Thank goodness there's at least one less Roundup Ready crop on the market to be spreading this plague farther still.
(Photo credit: daryl_mitchell on Flickr.)
