Corporate Kneebiters
World According to Monsanto, pt 4, rBGH and Bt Crops
Published June 18, 2009 @ 03:37PM PT
This installment of the World According To Monsanto documentary (and a big shout out to Robert Wager, who convinced me that I wasn't taking a nearly hard enough line on biotech) starts out talking about rBGH, recombinant bovine growth hormone.
Understand that this hormone is a mimic of a hormone naturally found in cows' bodies during a certain stage of their development. It's nothing very strange.
Nonetheless, rBGH use in adult milk cows causes painful, continuous udder infections and other health problems. This requires the use of constant, elevated doses of antibiotics, and there still ends up being pus in the resulting milk. The hormone isn't reactive in human bodies; not directly, not until it breaks down, and then it seems to promote reproductive cancers.
It's extremely important to understand that protein and hormone interactions in living bodies are very complex. Introducing a hormone at the wrong developmental stage can prove a disaster. Introducing a normally safe protein or compound at high doses, or to the wrong person, or with the wrong chemical companions, can be a disaster.
This is why controlled, independent safety testing is important when introducing novel compounds to the food system or medical repertoire.
Even though rBGH is ostensibly natural, it isn't normally present in adult cows at these artificial levels, or in food that we've had a chance to try over the long term for safety. This is where the equivalence arguments fall down, because even a cursory understanding of the problems inherent in the safety testing of medicinal and food compounds reveals cases where assumptions of safety were badly misplaced because one compound seemed to be 'just like' some other, normally encountered compound.
Sometimes, problems don't reveal themselves for decades.
With Bt crops, not only are they far more expensive and higher input than traditional crop varieties, but it still requires plenty of pesticides and may cause allergic reactions.
The Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin comes from a bacteria and no amount of garden-variety plant breeding or typical food preparation technique would ever add significant quantities of it to the human diet. Yet Bt crops produce this toxin throughout their tissues, including the edible portions.
Perhaps stories of animals dying after foraging on crop remains, something that rarely happens in the US because of the separation of animal and crop agriculture, are anecdotal and not related. I want a public, independent, well-controlled study to prove it.
Perhaps stories of field workers getting allergic reactions from handling Bt cotton are anecdotal, maybe they were reacting to some crop chemical or other unknown allergen. Prove it. Run proper studies and make the data public.
'It's safe because we said so,' whether the 'we' at this point is the biotech firms or their cowering minions at USDA and the land grant universities, cuts no ice.
There's very little in the history of industrial agriculture that leads me to believe they should get the benefit of the doubt.
World According to Monsanto, pt 3
Published June 18, 2009 @ 06:35AM PT
This segment starts out with a heavy emphasis on the safety angle. Monsanto's genetically engineered crops (and everyone else's genetically modified organisms) haven't been tested for safety, they were just declared to be safe.
We've been eating them for years, so they're safe. This is medically unsound, unscientific reasoning.
But Congress doesn't give a damn about safety until people are actually dropping dead from your product, so, on to the next thing. Biotech representatives will insist that depriving poor countries of biotech seeds is a hateful, possibly racist act, spawned of a lack of concern for the starving and poverty-stricken.
Erm, about that, from the Center for Food Safety:
Washington D.C., February 11, 2009 - A new report released today by the Center for Food Safety and Friends of the Earth International warned that genetically modified (GM) crops are benefiting biotech food giants instead of the worldís hungry population, which is projected to increase to 1.2 billion by the year 2025 due to the global food crisis.
The report explains how biotech firms like Monsanto are exploiting the dramatic rise in world grain prices that are responsible for the global food crisis by sharply increasing the prices of GM seeds and chemicals they sell to farmers, even as hundreds of millions go hungry.
The findings of the report support a comprehensive United Nationsí assessment of world agriculture ñ the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) - which in 2008 concluded that GM crops have little potential to alleviate poverty and hunger in the world. IAASTD experts recommended instead low-cost, low-input agroecological farming methods.
... "GM seeds and the pesticides used with them are much too expensive for Africaís small farmers. Those who promote this technology in developing countries are completely out of touch with reality," he added.
"U.S. farmers are facing dramatic increases in the price of GM seeds and the chemicals used with them," said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the US-based Center for Food Safety and co-author of the report. "Farmers in any developing country that welcomes Monsanto and other biotech companies can expect the same fate - sharply rising seed and pesticide costs, and a radical decline in the availability of conventional seeds," he added.
GM seeds cost from two to over four times as much as conventional, non-GM seeds, and the price disparity is increasing. From 80% to over 90% of the soybean, corn and cotton seeds planted in the U.S. are GM varieties. Thanks to GM trait fee increases, average U.S. seed prices for these crops have risen by over 50% in just the past two to three years. ...
The world's poor can't afford this. They need low cost solutions that have a chance at profitability even when the fertilizer budget runs low.
World According to Monsanto, pt 2
Published June 17, 2009 @ 02:44PM PT
At CivilEats, Paula Crossfield deals, ever so much more patiently than I, with the pointlessness of promoting our failed biotechnology models abroad:
... Instead of teaching poor countries to fish, so to speak, we are selling them the fish with the hook still in its mouth.
That hook infers dependence, but there is also another catch: depleted resources. Biotechnology as it is used right now cannot be sustainable. It relies heavily on three things that are waning: surplus water, cheap oil and a stable climate. As much as biotech proponents claim their technologies could be used for sustainable aims, we don’t have decades to wait while the technology is perfected. And what if it is never perfected? In addition, in putting all of our eggs in one basket with biotech, the problem is misrepresented, and solutions that are already out there are being ignored.
It seems, therefore, that the only real solution to hunger is to transform the food system from the ground up. In Africa, 80% of the population is rural, and there are 33 million small farms (those farming less than 2 hectares), which produce 90% of the continent’s food (Patel and Giménez, 2009). Why don’t we, then, instead of promoting an intensive agriculture that is ruining our environment, our health and is lining the pockets of a few corporations, increase aid to agriculture? ...
Again, in a place so dependent on small-scale, local agriculture, introducing dodgy and expensive biotech traits, as well as export-oriented policies that encourage people to "get big or get out", as they say in the US, is a recipe for disaster. There's no housing or employment infrastructure to turn them all into urban professionals, or even a blue-collar working class, as we would think of those things.
With many of African countries decimated by AIDS, drought or civil war, they can't bear the cost of our capital and input intensive agricultural models. They need the best modern agricultural research, the cheapest and the most effective, which happens to be ecological agriculture methods.
Anyway, here's more documentary goodness. This second part starts off talking about the PCB chemicals Monsanto has been releasing since early last century, knew were toxic in the 1930s, and continued to produce until forced to stop. They've contaminated the entire world, and these abusive liars want us to trust their word on the safety of biotech crops:
World According to Monsanto, pt. 1
Published June 17, 2009 @ 01:20PM PT
At Monsanto's Genuity (TM) site, they say of their upcoming brand of corn that ...
... The drought-tolerance gene works by mitigating the impact of low soil-moisture content on the plant's physiology—enabling the corn plant to maintain metabolism for a longer period of time during drought stress.
Drought tolerant technology has the potential to improve on-farm productivity around the world. And it's coming soon.
They've even launched a water utilization learning center to talk about how their new trait is going to revolutionize farming. Or has the potential to revolutionize farming. Maybe. By about 6-10 percent.
From Joel K. Bourne Jr. writing in National Geographic, May 2009:
... So far, genetic breakthroughs that would free green revolution crops from their heavy dependence on irrigation and fertilizer have proved elusive. Engineering plants that can fix their own nitrogen or are resistant to drought "has proven a lot harder than they thought," says Pollan. Monsanto's Fraley predicts his company will have drought-tolerant corn in the U.S. market by 2012. But the increased yields promised during drought years are only 6 to 10 percent above those of standard drought-hammered crops.
And so a shift has already begun to small, underfunded projects scattered across Africa and Asia. Some call it agroecology, others sustainable agriculture, but the underlying idea is revolutionary: that we must stop focusing on simply maximizing grain yields at any cost and consider the environmental and social impacts of food production.
... Ackim Mhone's story is typical. By incorporating legumes into his rotation, he's doubled his corn yield on his small plot of land while cutting his fertilizer use in half. "That was enough to change the life of my family," Mhone says, and to enable him to improve his house and buy livestock. ...
Doubled yields from inexpensive ecological agriculture practices vs. 6-10% increases in yield during drought years from expensive, needy seeds that come with technology fees and end-user licensing agreements attached. It's a choice between making your soil naturally fertile and stripping its fertility through monocropping, then adding fertilizer back in.
Gosh, what a tough decision.
Sustainability and Hunger
Published June 16, 2009 @ 01:06PM PT
There are things people need to understand about hunger, courtesy of Food First:
... Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs - enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products. ...
So remember this: we have enough food in the world to make everyone fat. Everyone.
This is a distribution problem, a social justice problem, a profit-sharing problem, an employment security problem, a land access problem ... but there's an abundance of food in the world. The people flogging scarcity and crop yields as our biggest obstacles to feeding the world are at best misinformed, at worst, deliberately lying for personal or political gain.
In the case of politicians, those of them who are generally progressive, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt that they've been misled by hyper-slick lobbyists who make a convincing case that their corporations are doing good and really care about the public interest. The large food corporations have even bought out much of the anti-hunger lobby in the US, donating to their causes and sponsoring their DC publicity events, all for the sake of preventing anyone from looking too closely at how their management of food distribution channels actively promotes hunger.
It works really well.
Consider Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent call for support to 'sustainable agriculture'. She outlines seven principles, elaborated here, likely without realizing that the implications of the first, as commonly implemented, can readily undermine the third:
War on Evolution
Published June 13, 2009 @ 05:05AM PT
Those folks at Monsanto, always making with the funny:
MonsantoCo @ethicurean Unfortch some are resistant. We work with academics to figure out how to effectively combat resistance. http://bit.ly/10zPHs
F*ing hilarious.
Look, resistance is an evolutionary process, not a fixed f*ing trait. You can't end the development of resistance in short-lived, ubiquitous species like herbaceous perennials and crop pest insects unless you put a complete end to every single individual/mating pair of the species that's capable of reproduction. Can't be done.
And if it could be done, if we managed to make whole inconvenient species extinct, that would probably end up being an ecological disaster. You might be thinking, 'But Natasha, humans cause species to go extinct all the time. What do you mean it can't be done.' Here goes.
Large, waddling, flightless birds: extinctable.
Predators that depend on big, tasty, easy to spot herbivores: extinctable.
Enormous, slow-growing trees: extinctable.
Chemically sensitive amphibians: extinctable.
Cute, tiny mint plants that only live at the edges of seasonal, rain-filled ponds in a small part of California: extinctable.
Mosquitoes: like the poor, they will always be with us.
Mice: when we finally have space colonies, they will have mice.
Crabgrass: at the end of the world, when the sun is about to die and burn the inner planets to a crisp, there will be crabgrass.
Cockroaches: after the end of the world, when the sun has burned the inner planets to a crisp, a last few cockroaches may still be hanging around, licking at the crabgrass cinders.
Am I getting a pattern across? Pest organisms are likely to be exactly the most change-tolerant, widespread and prolific of species. Some of them will survive, and they will adapt to the herbicide, and then you will eventually have to go and find a new one.
In the meantime, that herbicide which can kill most of the most resilient species has meant Götterdämmerung and good night for the cute little rare mint and the delicate salamander. Which means less competition for the crabgrass and cockroaches, which might not have been able to move into so many areas had more specialized species survived the human onslaught.
Yet how, how does Monsanto propose to deal with these problems? From a page on the site they linked to:
Monsanto and university weed scientists have also identified specific common factors that are often present in areas where glyphosate resistance has developed. These factors are:
- Limited or no crop rotation
- Limited or no tillage practices
- A high dependency on glyphosate alone or a limited use of other herbicides, and
- Reduced rates of glyphosate
Limited rotation, with you on that one. Insufficient tillage ... erm, isn't chemical no-till the thing your puppet in the House of Representatives, Rep. Collin Peterson, something you're lobbying to get subsidy money to producers for? And, frak me, a limited use of other herbicides? Isn't the selling point of this junk supposed to be that it reduces herbicide use?
Oh, wait, no. You have got to be f*ing kidding me. Reduced glyphosate use causes weed resistance? How bloody well convenient. And profitable.
Farmers in the Asian tropics, a very long time ago, developed methods of farming that were both highly productive and resilient to pests. If you've ever been in the tropics, you know that there's no escaping the bugs and the plants aren't less pushy, just slower. Their methods, which involved building soil organic matter and using the biodiverse cultivation patterns that can be observed in nature, eventually became what we here know as organic farming.
With the kind of coordinated breeding and cultivation technique research we can do now, as well as our ready access to such a diverse plant genome and extremely clever methods of farming that provided an abundance of pre-industrial food, it's possible to create agricultural ecosystems that work with the process of evolution. Ones that can feed the whole world now, without destroying our ability to feed the whole world in the future.
You can work with evolution, or evolution will work you. But it stops for no one.
(Photo credit: Neil T on Flickr.)
Agriculture Killing Climate (Bill)
Published June 12, 2009 @ 06:49PM PT
Speaker Pelosi has apparently personally contacted Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN) to secure his support for the climate bill:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) placed a call Wednesday night to her Agriculture Committee chairman, hoping to find out why he is holding up a climate change bill that she wants passed this summer.
Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who has made known that he has enough votes to derail the Speaker’s priority legislation if agricultural provisions aren’t changed, said he spoke with Pelosi “for a while” and that it was “cordial.”
“She’s not putting any pressure on me,” Peterson said. “She knows where I’m coming from.” ...
Where he's coming from ... hmm, where could that be? Over at OpenLeft, Chris Bowers asks Peterson to just name a price and get to the haggling:
... If what members of the Agriculture Committee want in order to pass climate change legislation is more money for farmers, why don't we just start handing out cash to farmers? Cash would be better than these credits, since it both gives the farmers the money they want but doesn't exempt them from reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Everyone wins.
Of course, in order to do this, the Agriculture Committee would first need to specific exactly how much cash they want directed to the farmer's in their districts. While it could be as high as $24 billion, that would still be a small price to pay for mitigating climate change. ...
As I've said before, I think it's less morally problematic than the bribes that are going to the coal companies for 'clean' coal research. Agriculture could, in theory, if not as commonly practiced, be a boon to the climate. Coal? Erm, no.
Peterson is at the least being honest, and not asking for something oxymoronic by nature. Still, as Tom Philpott notes, most of the money would go straight to Monsanto: by supporting chemical no-till farming made possible through the offices of their Roundup herbicide.
The best I'll say about the practice is that it may prevent erosion. Though again, slightly less problematic than paying off an industry that's steadily leveling the Appalachians.
Let the haggling begin, I suppose. The result is sure to be a mockery of science, as Peterson is allergic to the idea of independent EPA review of the carbon sequestration benefits of any approved practices, but science isn't the point. The Republican members of the committee don't even believe in that, Philpott says they used their time at the recent committee hearing mostly to deny anthropogenic global warming.
Why is it such a commonplace, acceptable thing for Congress to have whole committees packed with greedy, sometimes reprehensible, human beings? Who knows. But tell you what ...
Next time you want to ask for a raise, don't be embarassed to do it. Congress isn't.
(Photo credit: kimberlyfaye on Flickr.)
