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GMOs

Organic Islands, featuring Percy Schmeiser

The Organic Islands festival took place last weekend, and we went for a sunny Saturday afternoon of tastings and talks and music. Found some Emmer (aka Farro, in Italy) an ancient wheat now being grown for the first time on Vancouver Island.

There were interesting causes to support, like this one where you can register your fruit tree and have others pick and use your fruit if you don’t want all of it.

A lost tree being tormented by small children.

One of the events we wanted to catch was the GE Free BC panel, featuring Yukon farmer Tom Rudge,

Powell River politician Colin Palmer,

activist Josh Brandon from Greenpeace,

and special guest Percy Schmeiser,

whose story I knew from CBC coverage and films like The Future of Food and Life Running Out of Control.

Schmeiser impressed me with his speaking skills. I hadn’t known he was a former MLA as well as a farmer. I did know he was a life-long seed developer who had spent $400,000 and 7 years of his life fighting Monsanto on the grounds of patent infringement when Monsanto found GM (Roundup-Ready) canola growing on Schmeiser’s field in 1998.

The rather alarming issue of GM canola crossing itself with non-GM canola is something Schmeiser talks a lot about: “You can’t contain nature” is his mantra, and the message he dearly wants to deliver to regions tempted to introduce GM crops alongside non-GM.

Canola, a Canadian cross-bred (not genetically-modified) brassica plant that was developed in the 1970s, is an important crop because it is used for vegetable oils (lower in saturated fats than any other oil) and animal feed as well as a rotation crop.

Canola has proven it doesn’t obey corporate laws of ownership and whether through wind, rain, pollen drift, flood or spillage, GM and non-GM canola have interbred right across Canada and pretty much killed the country’s organic production of canola (no GM crops or products are allowed in Canadian organic production).

Not only does being GM make the contaminated crops unexportable to the many countries which do not allow GM imports, it also – from Schmeiser’s experience – makes those crops, and their seeds, the property of Monsanto, since you have, willingly or not, and no matter to what degree, ended up growing a Monsanto-engineered plant. This is anathema to farmers who have traditionally saved seed from their own crops to plant the next year. But if you grow GM plants, Canadian patent law prevents you from saving and sowing or trading or selling that seed, since it includes Monsanto technology and is therefore not yours to do with as you please. To reinforce this message, farmers who buy the seed are required to sign Technology Use Agreements which forbid farmers from re-using seed, and require that they purchase new seed each year

Schmeiser also talked about the promises Monsanto had made: higher crop yields, better nutritional content, decreased use of pesticides (insecticides and herbicides), an end to world hunger. Instead, the crop yields from GM crops are lower, nutritional values from industrial crops are demonstrably down, and the potency of today’s Roundup is 4x what it was ten years ago because glyphosate-resistant strains of weeds (superweeds) have evolved; the content of new herbicides currently used in Saskatchewan includes Dioxins, which have toxic effects on human health and are largely passed to humans through the food supply.

Standing ovation…

Also discussed by the panel was the point about there being no research about GM crops aside from what Monsanto itself funds, selects and publishes, and how that just might be a problem in terms of credibility and human safety.

The GE Free BC campaign aims to make BC a GE free region. They’re also linked with campaigns to promote that seemingly elusive goal of requiring food containing genetically engineered substances to be labelled in this country, and another worth-while movement to ban Terminator technology, which would allow corporations to genetically sterilise their crops, ensuring farmers would have no choice but to purchase seed from them each year.

After that we needed a hot dog, from the eternally popular organic hot dog stand where we managed to get the last three hot dog buns on offer for the day.

Then we wandered beneath the attractive drystone arches of the Green Drinkery

for a glass of local wine

and a prime location to hear former Victoria resident Jeremy Fisher play us out.

GM food labelling – the debate

At last, I thought, some coverage of the bill c-517 debate on national radio! But no, I later realised I was tuned to Village 900 which was broadcasting a May 22 episode of an excellent program from Kootenay Co-op Radio called Deconstructing Dinner.

It was fascinating to hear the politicians who voted down the bill try to explain why they had done so. Listen for yourself; despite numerous polls which show Canadians want to know what they’re eating, too many politicians doggedly maintain they think it would be harmful to Canadians to be able to distinguish between GM and non GM foods.

You can read the debates in the Hansard: April 3 and May 5. See for yourself who said what, and who said nothing. Pretty interesting reading. As was the email I received from my MP who assures me he believes “in using a precautionary principle with regards to genetic engineering”. Apparently this precaution does not extend to labelling those precaution-worthy food items, since he voted against the bill.

Anyone in the neighbourhood wanting to talk more about this issue should come to the Slow Food Vancouver Island discussion on July 9.

GM food labelling in Canada – no, no, and no

According to the note I received from my MP today, Bill C-517, which proposed mandatory labelling of genetically modified foods in Canada, did not pass second reading on May 7th 2008. I suppose this gives us a fair sense of which interests are running our country, and the public interest is not being considered. Now would be the time to write to your MPs and tell them to try again. I don’t think they heard us the first time. Or the second.

Some reading and looking

The Soil Association‘s recent report that showed crop yields for GM crops are actually no better and often worse than non-GM has coincided with a similar study published in the US, but so far neither report appears to have been found worthy of comment in GM-friendly Canada.

Were you questioning whether organic is really worth it? Here’s one writer who finds that organic foods are more nutritious than those raised by industrial methods (and an article of divided opinion, that still thinks they’re worth it). (And if you wonder why organic food costs so much, check out these regulations, covering permitted substances and the standards and principles which Canadian organic producers will have to follow from December of this year in order to qualify to use the Canada Organic logo.)

Can’t help wondering why this is news: recent headline from the Globe & Mail:
Schools that cut fat and sugar saw dramatic results

I liked Wendell Barry‘s summation of what to do, what to do in this confusing and frightening world, in the panel discussion I mentioned yesterday (Fast Food World: Perils and Promises of the Global Food Chain):

I think the way to begin is to ask yourself what you know about your own economy, your own food economy. Ask yourself where your food came from and what the cost of production was, what’s the ecological cost and the human cost. And I think the result of that exercise is that you don’t know very much at all… And I think when you come to that point, when you understand your ignorance of your own economy, you’ll understand that the only way to become knowledgeable about it is to exert your economic force in support of local production.

This selfsame Wendell Barry has a sobering article entitled Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits in the most recent issue (May 2008) of Harper‘s, which you can read excerpts from here.

And (thanks Bonnie) I just saw some amazing work by Seattle-based former corporate lawyer turned artist Chris Jordan. Called Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, he describes the project this way:

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on.

Monsanto movietime

Came across this documentary (The World According to Monsanto) which appeared on Arte in France on March 11 of this year. Worth a look if you had any curiosity about what Roundup is, who runs Monsanto, how the company influences decision making in its favour, what effect genetically-modified organisms are having and will have on food and other crops, and on the ability of farmers – particularly in the developing world – to survive the company’s economic might.

**April 27 update: mysteriously, the video has disappeared from Google Video, but for now at least catch it while you can, serialised on Youtube; part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11. What a funny old world. Monsanto exerting influence on public comment? I cannot help but wonder.**

Downloadable iPod version also available. (And you can buy a copy of the dvd (English soundtrack available) from Arte.) I found when I watched it on my laptop, the video kept sticking, but I could prod it along by clicking the play indicator arrow along the bottom of the viewing screen.

Global food & expensive wine

I just stopped myself from cheering when I read a newspaper report about global food and farming in an English paper on the plane ride home. The very next day A Friend (thank you, friend) sent me a link to The Guardian‘s coverage of the piece. Since the report’s release on April 15, it’s also been in the New York Times, Le Monde, der Spiegel and many others. But as of Thursday, there does not appear to be any coverage at all of this story in the Canadian press, other than a brief preview on the CBC news site. Perhaps it will break soon.

The report is a 2500 page plan for a global agriculture capable of seeing the world through the next 50 years. The study was the result of five years’ work by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD for merciful short) with input from some 400 experts; the organisation is funded by participating countries and by a serious group of international agencies (FAO, GEF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, the World Bank and WHO).

The report concluded that neither genetically-modified crops nor industrial food production are workable ways to feed the world; that the only way forward is to employ methods such as organic and small-scale agriculture. It must surely by now seem obvious to most of us, and is thankfully proposed in this report, that to survive in the world as it now is, we must grow our food sustainably: in ways that are less dependent on fossil fuels; make use of locally available resources, natural fertilizers and traditional seeds; and aim to preserve the soil and water supply. The report is critical of the whole biofuel madness: as we are already seeing, using food crops for biofuels is only going to worsen food shortages and price rises.

It should surprise no one that in light of these findings, Australia, the United States and Canada are the countries questioning some of the language in the report’s concerns about biotechnology, especially genetically modified foods. But these are the very countries which must make immediate changes if the world is to feed itself. So…. what happens next?

Summaries of the report are here, on the IAASTD’s website , and there is “a faithful summary of the leading scientific report” on GreenFacts. Unesco has some information and there are presentations and documents of all shapes and sizes about the report on the IAASTD’s Press Materials page.

Meanwhile, an interesting study of wine-drinking concludes that expensive wines do not bring more pleasure to drinkers unless they know what the price tag says. Although it concedes that educated palates do not find a negative correlation between wine and costliness, this overall trend – that expensive wine is actually less enjoyable if you don’t know what it costs – was revealed after more than 6,000 blind tastings were analysed by the American Association of Wine Economists.