GMOs – P2P Foundation

Opposition To GMOs Is Neither Unscientific Nor Immoral

Charles Eisenstein — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Is the engineering of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) a dangerous technology posing grave risks to human and ecological health? Or are GMOs a potent new tool in the onward march of modern agricultural technology in its race to feed the world?

In a recent opinion piece – Avoiding GMOs Isn’t Just Anti-science, It’s Immoral – Purdue University president Mitch Daniels offers an impassioned plea that we embrace GMOs in agriculture. Daniels’ argument runs as follows: The health and ecological safety of GMOs is unquestionable “settled science.” Therefore, it is immoral to deny developing countries the agricultural technology they need to boost food production and feed their growing populations. It seems an open-and-shut case: the self-indulgent anti-GMO fad among rich consumers threatens the less fortunate with starvation. As Daniels says, it is immoral for them to “inflict their superstitions on the poor and hungry”.

But let’s look at some of the assumptions that this argument takes for granted: (1) That GMOs are indeed safe, and (2) that GMOs and industrial agriculture in general allow higher yields than more traditional forms of agriculture.

The ecological and health safety of GMOs is more controversial scientifically than Daniels’ piece asserts. The problem is that it is hard to know which science – and which scientists – to trust. In the United States, most university agronomy departments receive massive funding from agritech companies who, according to Scientific American, “have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.” Since GMOs are proprietary, those companies can and do restrict who can perform research on their products. When a study does document harm, it and its authors are subjected to intense scrutiny, career-ending attacks, and even lawsuits. Imagine yourself as a graduate student at, say, Purdue University. How welcome do you think a research proposal on the health hazards of GMOs would be?

Nonetheless, there is a large and growing body of research that casts serious doubt on GMO safety, mostly published in Europe and Russia where support for GMOs is weaker. For a methodical and comprehensive overview of the topic see GMO Myths and Truths, which with hundreds of citations of peer-reviewed articles cannot be easily dismissed as “superstition.”

Nonetheless, it is easy to see how from Daniels’ seat, opposition to GMOs is unscientific. By and large, the scientific establishment does support GMOs. To oppose them, one must also question the impartiality and soundness of scientific institutions: universities, journals, and government agencies. Opposition to GMOs only makes sense as part of a larger social critique and critique of institutional science. If you believe that society’s main institutions are basically sound, then it is indeed irrational to oppose GMOs.

Similar observations apply to the second assumption, that only high-tech agriculture can feed the world. Again, opposition makes sense only by questioning larger systems.

Certainly, if you compare one monocropped field of GMO corn or soybeans to another field of non-GMO corn or soybeans, keeping all other variables constant, the first will outyield the second. But what happens if you compare not just one field to another, but a whole system of agriculture to another?

Such comparisons show that the assumption that more technology equals higher yield may not be justified. One indication is that around the world, small farms far outperform large farms in terms of yield. First observed by Nobel economist Amartya Sen in 1962, it has been confirmed by numerous studies in many countries. The best-known recent study looked at small farms in Turkey, which still has a strong base of traditional peasant agriculture. Small farms there outproduced large farms by a factor of 20, despite (or because of?) their slower adoption or non-adoption of modern methods.

Yet it is also true that scientific studies typically show organic crop yields to be lower than conventional yields. Here again though, we must look at what these studies take for granted. The high yields of small mixed farms are hard to measure because they typically produce multiple crops that may not find their way to commodity markets, but instead are consumed locally, sometimes outside the money economy. Moreover, traditional forms of agriculture often employ multicropping and intercropping. So while an organic corn field will underperform a GMO corn field, what about the total yield of a corn field that also grows beans and squash, and is patrolled by free ranging chickens who eat the bugs? What about when insect-damaged fruit or vegetable seconds feed pigs or other livestock?

Optimal results come from long, even multi-generational, experience applied in intimate relationship to each farm. Comparisons of organic and conventional agriculture often use organic farms recently converted from conventional practices; rarely do they consider the most highly evolved farms where soil, knowledge, and practices have been rebuilt over decades.

Another overlooked factor is that organic agricultural methods are also constantly improving. Newer forms of organic no-till horticulture can actually match and even outperform conventional methods. One of the best known innovators, Brown’s Ranch of North Dakota, uses a complex mix of cover crops and multilayered intercropping to maximize sunlight utilization and establish synergies among various plants. Such practices are highly specific to local soil conditions and microclimate, making them difficult to standardize and therefore difficult to scientifically study. Science depends on the control of variables. If you want to study the efficacy of a certain practice, it must be applied uniformly to several test plots and compared to several control plots. But organic agriculture at its best would never treat two plots of land exactly the same.

For organic agriculture to work, the factory model of standardized parts and procedures must give way to a relational model that recognizes the uniqueness of every piece of earth. So-called “organic” practices that use the factory model are simply an inferior version of conventional agriculture.

Taking that model for granted, Daniels is right. We do need an endless succession of new chemicals and GMOs to compensate for the consequences of mechanized chemical agriculture, which include depletion of the soil, herbicide-resistant weeds, and pesticide-resistant insects. To keep the current system working, we need to intensify its practices.

The alternative is to transition to a truly organic system of agriculture. That is no small undertaking. For one thing, it would require far more people devoted to growing food, because high-yield organic practices are often highly labor-intensive. (On the bright side, labor on small, diversified farms need not involve heavy, routine drudgery, as is the case on large industrial-style farms.) Today, thanks to extreme mechanization, about one or two percent of the population in developed countries works in the agricultural sector. That number might need to increase to ten percent – about the proportion of farmers in the US in the 1950s. It would also require a lot more food to be grown in gardens. In World War Two, “Victory Gardens” in the United States provided some 40% of all produce consumed; in Russia to this day, small dachas produce 80% of its fruit, two-thirds of its vegetables, and nearly half its milk.

Gardening on this scale does not fit easily into existing consumerist lifestyles and mindsets. If we take for granted the framing of food security as “stocking the supermarket shelves” then again, there is little alternative to the current system.

If we take for granted disengagement from land, soil, and place, then there is little alternative to the current system.

If we take for granted continued rural depopulation in the less-developed world, then there is little alternative to the current system.

In other words, if we take for granted large-scale, industrialized agriculture growing commodity crops, then absolutely it helps to use the full complement of agricultural technology, such as GMOs, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, fungicides, insecticides, and so on.

Establishment science by and large takes these things for granted. Sentiments like Daniels’ are the sincere, exasperated protests of highly intelligent people doing their best to make the system work, according to their understanding of the world.

A different vision of the future is emerging however, one that takes none of the above for granted. It is a future where food production is re-localized, where many more people have their hands in the soil; where farming is no longer seen as a lowly profession, and where agriculture seeks to regenerate the land and become an extension of ecology, not an exception to ecology. The pro-and anti-GMO positions will remain irreconcilably polarized as long as these larger questions remain unexamined. What is at stake here is much more than a choice about GMOs. It is a choice between two very different systems of food production, two visions of society, and two fundamentally different ways to relate to plants, animals, and soil.

Photo by Jonathan Rolande

Originally published in the Huffinton Post

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Seeds: commons or corporate property?

Michael Lewis — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 11:00:00 +0000

This is one of the most dynamic and illuminating films (39 min.) I have seen for quite a while. It follows the lives and struggles to save seeds – families, small farmers, communities, nations. It brilliantly facilitates deepening our understanding on several fronts – the predatory core and corruption of global capitalism in the seed industry, the incredible resistance of farmers and peasants in 8 countries to having their seeds and thus food supply deemed illegal, and, how they are acting to preserve their food and cultural commons, and their basic human and cultural rights. I will definitely use this in educational settings to help people grapple with the multiple levels the struggle for transformation must contend in. So inspiring. The video is in Spanish but has subtitles in French, English and Portuguese. I think my colleagues in the food, commons, solidarity economy and cooperative movements will find this a useful resource.

From the video description:

Jointly produced by 8 Latin American organisations and edited by Radio Mundo Real, the documentary “Seeds: commons or corporate property?” draws on the experiences and struggles of social movements for the defence of indigenous and native seeds in Ecuador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras, Argentina, Colombia, and Guatemala.

The main characters are the seeds – indigenous, native, ours- in the hands of rural communities and indigenous peoples. The documentary illustrates that the defence of native seeds is integral to the defence of territory, life, and peoples’ autonomy. It also addresses the relationship between indigenous women and native seeds, as well as the importance of seed exchanges within communities. Exploring the historical origins of corn, and the appreciation and blessing of seeds by Mayan communities, this short film shows the importance of seeds in ceremonies, markets and exchanges.

Local experiences of recovery and management of indigenous seeds demonstrate the significant and ongoing struggles against seed laws, against UPOV and the imposition of transgenic seeds. Whilst condemning the devastation that such laws bring, this film captures the peoples’ resistance to the advancement of agribusiness.

The documentary is available in Spanish; with English, Portuguese and French subtitles. We invite you to watch it and to share it widely in order to continue defending the seeds which have become both peoples’ heritage, and which serve humankind on the path towards food sovereignty.

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The IP-based Enclosure of the World’s Largest Agricultural Crop

Ellen Brown — Wed, 06 Jul 2016 08:00:00 +0000

The war on cannabis that began in the 1930s seems to be coming to an end. Research shows that this natural plant, rather than posing a deadly danger to health, has a wide range of therapeutic benefits. But skeptics question the sudden push for legalization, which is largely funded by wealthy investors linked to Big Ag and Big Pharma.

In April, Pennsylvania became the 24^th state to legalize medical cannabis, a form of the plant popularly known as marijuana. That makes nearly half of US states. A major barrier to broader legalization has been the federal law under which all cannabis – even the very useful form known as industrial hemp – is classed as a Schedule I controlled substance that cannot legally be grown in the US. But that classification could change soon. In a letter sent to federal lawmakers in April, the US Drug Enforcement Administration said it plans to release a decision on rescheduling marijuana in the first half of 2016.

The presidential candidates are generally in favor of relaxing the law. In November 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would repeal all federal penalties for possessing and growing the plant, allowing states to establish their own marijuana laws. Hillary Clinton would not go that far but would drop cannabis from a Schedule I drug (a deadly dangerous drug with no medical use and high potential for abuse) to Schedule II (a deadly dangerous drug with medical use and high potential for abuse). Republican candidate Donald Trump says we are losing badly in the war on drugs, and that to win that war all drugs need to be legalized.

But it is Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein who has been called “weed’s biggest fan.” Speaking from the perspective of a physician and public health advocate, Stein notes that hundreds of thousands of patients suffering from chronic pain and cancers are benefiting from the availability of medical marijuana under state laws. State economies are benefiting as well. She cites Colorado, where retail marijuana stores first opened in January 2014. Since then, Colorado’s crime rates and traffic fatalities have dropped; and tax revenue, economic output from retail marijuana sales, and jobs have increased.

Among other arguments for changing federal law is that the marijuana business currently lacks access to banking facilities. Most banks, fearful of FDIC sanctions, won’t work with the $6.7 billion marijuana industry, leaving 70% of cannabis companies without bank accounts. That means billions of dollars are sitting around in cash, encouraging tax evasion and inviting theft, to which an estimated 10% of profits are lost. But that problem too could be remedied soon. On June 16, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved an amendment to prevent the Treasury Department from punishing banks that open accounts for state-legal marijuana businesses.

Boosting trade in the new marijuana market is not a good reason for decriminalizing it, of course, if it actually poses a grave danger to health. But there have been no recorded deaths from cannabis overdose in the US. Not that the herb can’t have problematic effects, but the hazards pale compared to alcohol (30,000 deaths annually) and to patented pharmaceuticals, which are now the leading cause of death from drug overdose. Prescription drugs taken as directed are estimated to kill 100,000 Americans per year.

Behind the War on Weed: Taking Down the World’s Largest Agricultural Crop

The greatest threat to health posed by marijuana seems to come from its criminalization. Today over 50 percent of inmates in federal prison are there for drug offenses, and marijuana tops the list. Cannabis cannot legally be grown in the US even as hemp, a form with very low psychoactivity. Why not? The answer seems to have more to do with economic competition and racism than with health.

Cannabis is actually one of the oldest domesticated crops, having been grown for industrial and medicinal purposes for millennia. Before 1937, it was also a component of at least 2,000 medicines.

In early America, it was considered a farmer’s patriotic duty to grow hemp. Cannabis was legal tender in most of the Americas from 1631 until the early 1800s. Americans could even pay their taxes with it. Benjamin Franklin’s paper mill used cannabis. Hemp crops produce nearly four times as much raw fiber as equivalent tree plantations; and hemp paper is finer, stronger and lasts longer than wood-based paper. Hemp was also an essential resource for any country with a shipping industry, since it was the material from which sails and rope were made.

Today hemp is legally grown for industrial use in hundreds of countries outside the US. A 1938 article in Popular Mechanics claimed it was a billion-dollar crop (the equivalent of about $16 billion today), useful in 25,000 products ranging from dynamite to cellophane. New uses continue to be found. Claims include eliminating smog from fuels, creating a cleaner energy source that can replace nuclear power, removing radioactive water from the soil, eliminating deforestation, and providing a very nutritious food source for humans and animals.

To powerful competitors, the plant’s myriad uses seem to have been the problem. Cannabis competed with the lumber industry, the oil industry, the cotton industry, the petrochemical industry and the pharmaceutical industry. In the 1930s, the plant in all its forms came under attack.

Its demonization accompanied the demonization of Mexican immigrants, who were then flooding over the border and were widely perceived to be a threat. Pot smoking was part of their indigenous culture. Harry Anslinger, called “the father of the war on weed,” was the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration. He fully embraced racism as a tool for demonizing marijuana. He made such comments as “marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others,” and “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” In 1937, sensational racist claims like these caused recreational marijuana to be banned; and industrial hemp was banned with it.

Classification as a Schedule I controlled substance came in the 1970s, with President Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. The Shafer Commission, tasked with giving a final report, recommended against the classification; but Nixon ignored the commission.

According to an April 2016 article in Harper’s Magazine, the War on Drugs had political motives. Top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman is quoted as saying in a 1994 interview:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Competitor or Attractive New Market for the Pharmaceutical Industry?

The documented medical use of cannabis goes back two thousand years, but the Schedule I ban has seriously hampered medical research. Despite that obstacle, cannabis has now been shown to have significant therapeutic value for a wide range of medical conditions, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, glaucoma, lung disease, anxiety, muscle spasms, hepatitis C, inflammatory bowel disease, and arthritis pain.

New research has also revealed the mechanism for these wide-ranging effects. It seems the active pharmacological components of the plant mimic chemicals produced naturally by the body called endocannabinoids. These chemicals are responsible for keeping critical biological functions in balance, including sleep, appetite, the immune system, and pain. When stress throws those functions off, the endocannabinoids move in to restore balance.

Inflammation is a common trigger of the disease process in a broad range of degenerative ailments. Stress triggers inflammation, and cannabis relieves both inflammation and stress. THC, the primary psychoactive component of the plant, has been found to have twenty times the anti-inflammatory power of aspirin and twice that of hydrocortisone.

CBD, the most-studied non-psychoactive component, also comes with an impressive list of therapeutic uses, including against cancer and as a super-antibiotic. CBD has been shown to kill “superbugs” that are resistant to currently available drugs. This is a major medical breakthrough, since for some serious diseases antibiotics have reached the end of their usefulness.

Behind the Push for Legalization

The pharmaceutical industry has both much to gain and much to lose from legalization of the cannabis plant in its various natural forms. Patented pharmaceuticals have succeeded in monopolizing the drug market globally. What that industry does not want is to be competing with a natural plant that anyone can grow in his backyard, which actually works better than very expensive pharmaceuticals without side effects.

Letitia Pepper, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, is a case in point. A vocal advocate for the decriminalization of marijuana for personal use, she says she has saved her insurance company $600,000 in the last nine years, using medical marijuana in place of a wide variety of prescription drugs to treat her otherwise crippling disease. That is $600,000 the pharmaceutical industry has not made, on just one patient. There are 400,000 MS sufferers in the US, and 20 million people who have been diagnosed with cancer sometime in their lives. Cancer chemotherapy is the biggest of big business, which would be directly threatened by a cheap natural plant-based alternative.

The threat to big industry profits could explain why cannabis has been kept off the market for so long. More suspicious to Pepper and other observers is the sudden push to legalize it. They question whether Big Pharma would allow the competition, unless it had an ace up its sleeve. Although the movement for marijuana legalization is a decades-old grassroots effort, the big money behind the recent push has come from a few very wealthy individuals with links to Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company and producer of genetically modified seeds. In May of this year, Bayer AG, the giant German chemical and pharmaceutical company, made a bid to buy Monsanto. Both companies are said to be working on a cannabis-based extract.

Natural health writer Mike Adams warns:

[W]ith the cannabis industry predicted to generate over $13 billion by 2020, becoming one of the largest agricultural markets in the nation, there should be little doubt that companies like Monsanto are simply waiting for Uncle Sam to remove the herb from its current Schedule I classification before getting into the business.

. . . [O]ther major American commodities, like corn and soybeans, are on average between 88 and 91 percent genetically modified. Therefore, once the cannabis industry goes national, and that is most certainly primed to happen, there will be no stopping the inevitability of cannabis becoming a prostituted product of mad science and shady corporate monopoly tactics.

With the health benefits of cannabis now well established, the battlefield has shifted from its decriminalization to who can grow it, sell it, and prescribe it. Under existing California law, patients like Pepper are able to grow and use the plant essentially for free. New bills purporting to legalize marijuana for recreational use impose regulations that opponents say would squeeze home growers and small farmers out of the market, would heighten criminal sanctions for violations, and could wind up replacing the natural cannabis plant with patented, genetically modified (GMO) plants that must be purchased year after year. These new bills and the Monsanto/Bayer connection will be the subject of a follow-up article. Stay tuned.

Originally published as “As the War on Weed Winds Down, Will Monsanto Be the Big Winner?” at Ellenbrown.com

Photo by DonGoofy

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