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Denise Caruso is the former technology columnist for
The New York Times and serves on the board of the Independent Media Institute,
the parent organization of AlterNet. Her book, Redefining Risk in the
Post-Genome World, will be published by Doubleday in 2005. Bad Seeds By Denise Caruso, AlterNet. Posted August 23, 2004. Whoever controls the seed controls the food. And as
a new film documents, the dangers of monoculture, industrial agriculture -
and Monsanto - bode poorly for the future of food. In less skillful hands, a film about genetically
modified (GM) food could have been tough sledding for regular folks to sit
through. Making visual sense of the science alone would be a daunting task.
But The Future of Food is an engaging and lucid presentation of not only the
science of genetic engineering, but of the people and the politics behind
what looks to be a pitched battle to control the global food supply. Deborah Koons Garcia, a
long-time documentary filmmaker (and wife of the Grateful Dead's
Jerry Garcia), spent the past three years writing, directing and producing
Food for her Mill Valley, CA-based Lily Films. The idea for the film came
after her award-winning educational series "All About Babies,"an in-depth examination of the first two
years of a child's life. She's had a lifelong concern about how food is
grown, and "I always wanted to make a big film about agriculture that
was as thorough as 'Babies,'" said Garcia. She's said that her goal in making the film was to
produce a cross between Silent Spring - Rachel Carson's historic
shot-heard-'round-the-world about the dangers of chemical pesticides - and
The Battle of Algiers, the 1965 film by Gillo Pontecorvo that became a training film for the Black
Panthers as well as those who opposed the Vietnam War. And it's true, The Future
of Food makes no secret of its desire to see GM seed and food removed from
the food supply. But its rendition of the science of genetic modification
(and its potential risks) is clear and accurate. And the many startling facts
that it presents about both the agriculture industry and the U.S. government
that continues to prop it up with taxpayer subsidies make the film very
difficult for a reasonable person to dismiss as mere anti-GM propaganda. Fear of a Modified Planet In farming, a monoculture is the result of
cultivating a single plant variety over a large area of land. Monocultures
make a single strain of plant - one particular variety of soybean,
for example, out of the hundreds that may exist - particularly vulnerable to
being wiped out by a single pest, microbial infection or some other
environmental stressor, like an unseasonable heat wave or cold snap. In fact, according to the film, a monoculture caused
the 1845 potato blight and subsequent famine in Ireland that killed a million
people. When the same blight hit Peru, where potatoes originated and many
different strains are still grown, its effect was far less devastating. One of the hazards that's
already come to pass with GM crops is that seeds from modified,
"transgenic" plants are contaminating fields planted with
traditional, non-GM crops. History provides ample evidence that this type of
contamination and other unintentional plantings of GM seed may gradually
create dangerous, invasive species-type monocultures on many of the most
fertile, diverse and productive crop lands in the world. "A single genotype that's preferential crowds
out diversity, and that is a threat to food security," says one of the
scientists interviewed in the film. "Without access to genetic
resources, we will have challenges we cannot solve." And while this is a frightening enough proposition,
it becomes clear in The Future of Food that there are other, equally
insidious "monocultures" involved in this story. The second, more figurative monoculture is
developing as a result of consolidation in the food supply chain. Today only
four clusters of seed companies provide seed to farmers around the world. In
the last decade, this consolidation has started to happen in the retail
sector too. Within the next 10 years, one expert estimates, all retail food
will come from six American firms. This level of corporate control means
we'll have virtually no choice about what's on our store shelves. As another scientist in the film says, "Whoever
controls the seed, controls the food." The third and possibly most frightening monoculture is
the political one that Garcia details. It's already contaminated most of what
could pass as public discourse, and it's co-evolved between government
regulators and industry. Industry, in the case of GM food, meaning primarily
the Monsanto Company. A one-stop shop for global industrial agriculture,
Monsanto has also managed to install a revolving door between its corporate
headquarters and most of the agencies in the U.S. government that regulate
its products. During the first Bush administration, for example,
after Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists protested the lack of
regulation for GM foods, the agency hired Michael Taylor, a former Monsanto
official, to write a new, industry-friendly FDA policy for GM food crops.
Linda Fisher, a former executive vice president at Monsanto, is now deputy
administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. (According to the
film, Fisher has actually been back and forth between Monsanto and EPA three
times.) Ann Veneman, the head of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, is a former Monsanto executive. So is Mickey
Cantor, former Secretary of Commerce. As is Clarence Thomas: now a Supreme
Court judge, formerly a lawyer in Monsanto's pesticide and agriculture
division. One is tempted to begin this next sentence with
"As a result ..." But of course we don't know why, exactly, the
U.S. EPA and FDA have determined that GM crops and the foods produced from
them should be classified under the rubric "GRAS" - generally
recognized as safe. In any case, the fact remains that these products require
no labeling, no tractability, no corporate liability and no ongoing
collection of data on health effects. And the GRAS designation doesn't even touch the
patent laws that allow companies like Monsanto to prosecute farmers who end
up with Monsanto plants that they didn't sow contaminating crops on their own
property. Just blowing in from a neighboring field is good enough for the
company to drive onto thousands of farmers' properties and demand a sample of
whatever is growing in their fields. One farmer in the film, who was being
sued by Monsanto, believes the company has sent 9,000 patent infringement
letters demanding payment, and has 100 active lawsuits against farmers. "It's like a return to the feudal system,"
he said. Roundup of Reliable Sources While The Future of Food falls short of Garcia's
goal of creating a hybrid of Silent Spring and The Battle of Algiers, that's
hardly her fault. First, there's a shameful lack of scientific data about
genetic engineering overall: simply not enough to support or condemn GM food
in the same way that Carson condemned DDT. As one scientist says, transgenic
manipulations are "probably the largest biological experiment humanity
has ever entered into," while there's been virtually no long-term risk
or safety analyses to support their widespread deployment. As for Algiers: so
far, successful guerrilla warfare against multinational corporations has
proven to be even more difficult to sustain than war on the equally elusive
target of terrorism. That said, the film is an
eloquent, compelling introduction to one of the most complicated, critically
important and criminally overlooked issues of the day. It's a story
well-told, mostly by the people who are living it - the film's
"consultants," as they're called, are for the most part involved in
blowing the whistle, or trying to, on the present situation. They include Andrew Kimbrell,
the executive director of the Center for Food Safety; Charles Benbrook,
Ph.D., the former director of the Board on Agriculture for the National
Academy of Science whose extensive research counters much of the biotech
industry's hype; Rodney Nelson of Nelson Farm Enterprises in North Dakota,
who claims his livelihood and reputation was destroyed by a Monsanto lawsuit;
Ignacio Chapela, the U.C. Berkeley professor whose
graduate student discovered that the Mexican land races of maize had been
contaminated with Monsanto's Bt version - and whose peer-reviewed results
were subsequently disavowed in pages of a leading science journal; and Arpad Puzstai, the former Rowett Research Institute scientist who was suspended
from his position after releasing preliminary results that transgenic
potatoes had stunted growth in rats. And perhaps most famously, Percy Schmeiser,
the Canadian canola farmer whose fields were invaded by Monsanto's
"Roundup Ready" canola seeds which blew off a neighbor's truck
driving by his land. ("Roundup Ready" seeds have been genetically
altered to resist the popular herbicide, Roundup, so that farmers can douse
entire fields with the chemical and only the crops survive. Monsanto sells
farmer both the seed and the herbicide.) Monsanto sued him for infringing on
its patent, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court in Canada; Schmeiser lost. People who know the subject matter may have some
quibbles with Garcia's presentation. For example, nowhere in the film does
she say that she tried to contact Monsanto for a comment, although apparently
she did and they didn't respond. Noting this would have deflected at least
the most obvious criticism about why and how Food is an un-balanced
representation of the situation. And some of the facts of the cases she presents - in
particular, the Percy Schmeiser case - may have suffered
a bit from wishful interpretation. The Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser decision made headlines around the world
because for the first time a company won control over the higher life form -
in this case, the plant - that contained its patented gene, and not just the
gene itself. But according to an article on the decision,
published in the July-August 2004 issue of the newsletter GeneWatch,
"the Court was at pains to point out that its decision was based on the
facts as found at trial and that in different factual circumstances, a
different legal outcome" might have resulted. The factual circumstances
were that a year after Schmeiser's fields were
contaminated, Monsanto's tests showed that 95 to 98 percent of his plants
contained the company's patented gene. "The issue is not the perhaps adventitious
arrival of Roundup Ready Canola on Mr Schmeiser's land in 1998," it says in Paragraph 92
of the decision. "What is at
stake in this case is the sowing and cultivation [its emphasis] which
necessarily involves deliberate and careful activity on the part of the
farmer." Nowhere does Schmeiser or
the film explain the conflict between the original, accidental arrival of
Monsanto's canola on his land and the court's finding - undisputed by Schmeiser - that he'd sown and cultivated the seeds once
they were there. Analyses of the case have been based on wildly diverging
versions of what actually happened. By not acknowledging this factor in the
court's decision, the film again opens itself to accusations of selective
interpretation of the facts. But these are small as quibbles go. If The Future of
Food starts making the rounds on VHS and DVD in living rooms, as Garcia is
hoping it will, it might well start a movement that cannot be stopped in the
usual fashion; that is, by maligning researchers or suing farmers. Garcia
says she often sees people cry during the film, or they "get so freaked
out about food that they stay awake at night and end up going through all
their cupboards checking ingredients and chucking food." Such reactions might instigate a grassroots response
across the U.S. much like that which is happening in California today:
following the example of Mendocino and Trinity counties, which have passed
laws banning genetically modified organisms, several other California
counties have begun GE-free campaigns. Vermont and Maine are considering
moratoriums or bans as well. The power
of such a response should not be underestimated: In response to overwhelming
negative reaction from consumers and suppliers around the world, Monsanto has
dropped its Roundup Ready wheat globally and withdrawn its applications for
food use in all countries except for the U.S. Of course, it has already been approved for human
consumption here. Click here to ORDER YOUR COPY OF ‘THE
FUTURE OF FOOD’ http://www.thefutureoffood.com/synopsis.htm |