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On Organic Food Here is a report from the front which I visited at the international Organic Agriculture conference at Guelph in January and in June at the Council of Canadians’ BioJustice conference in Toronto. There is cause for cautious optimism. The rapaciousness of the biotech industry is worse than ever, but the intelligence of the ordinary person, who won’t be fooled or bought, and the determination of some of the world’s greatest scientists are becoming any Devil’s match. The Biotech Thugs What Health Canada and their biotech buddies don’t tell you, of course, is that pigs fed Bt corn go into false pregnancies, and even though their estrogen and progesterone levels are appropriate, there are no piglets. The Iowa Farm Bureau is horrified because more and more pig farmers reported this problem since October 2000. A doctor at the Center for Veterinary Medicine in Washington DC said, “We are working with a problem nobody has ever seen before. It’s not in the books.” You bet it isn’t, and this is just the beginning of what’s not going to be found in any medical book because nobody knows what this messing around with genes can do. Not even the mad scientists. And the biotech CEO’s don’t want to know. But never mind the pigs, how about the fact that Epicyte Corporation has developed a spermicidal corn that prevents human conception? Will it send women into pseudo-pregnancies, or maybe do wondrous things to men? Nothing is too absurd to imagine. In addition to the hazards to agriculture, biodiversity and health posed by biotech products, their need for increased (not decreased – as falsely asserted by the industry) use of pesticides causes the quality of water to be threatened even more. As the biotech companies are also the world’s largest producers of pharmaceuticals, those, too, contaminate the water with synthetic drugs finding their way into the food of people for whom these drugs were never perscribed - and what many of these chemicals do to animals and the soil is barely known. What is known, is that the world’s waters are contaminated withenough antibiotics to render the load carcinogenic to many river and salt-water species. The collateral damage of this current World War is everywhere, including in foods never targetted for genetic manipulation. One in four eggs in 1999 did not measure up to our food safety standards, and 50% of US honey contained the carcinogen phenol. In 2001 one quarter of our maple syrup was contaminated with the (banned) carcinogen paraformaldehyde, and more than half contained neurotoxic lead. “Drug residues in eggs, lead in maple syrup, and phenol in honey – Canadians can be excused for skipping breakfast” observed Burkhard Mausberg, the executive director of Environmental Defence Canada. The big biotech companies spent US $ 50 billion within the last few years on just advertising genetically engineered food products – this figure does not include what they shelled out for lobbying politicians. The strategy is simple: make the process irreversible. “The hope of the [biotech] industry is that over time the market is so flooded that there is nothing you can do about it, you just sort of surrender,” said the vice president of the strategic agriculture and marketing consulting firm Promor International. Having wrecked the biological identity of canola already, our chief export food, and created superweeds through the Roundup resistant biotech crops which no known poison can control, the industry’s next project is genetically engineered wheat. If that is released into the environment, the immense wealth it will generate at first for its creators will be matched only by starvation on an unthinkable scale – right here in North America. But not all business is created equal. Some of the largest producers of packaged food listen to the consumer, as good businessmen should. However, as the biotech bosses see it, if the consumer objects and is not lulled into compliance by the propaganda of advertising, brute force is next. Consider the following, reported in the Ontario Farmer April 2, 2002: The CEOs of Weetabix and Canada Bread spoke out against GE wheat at a recent convention because of lack of consumer acceptance. They told biotech industry representative Paul Stevenson of the American Baking Institute they would not buy it. “Who is pushing for this stuff?” asked the CEOs, and Stevenson replied, “The company who has it spent a lot of money developing it, so they want to get it out.” Weetabix’s CEO Paul Millard countered,”So they are not listening to the consumer?” Stevenson smiled and replied, “I would say that’s possible, yes.” To their credit, Weetabix and Canada Bread stayed firm: they won’t buy the stuff. The industry’s great hope for furthering the genetic pollution to the point of no return has been China. Its immense size, the gratifyingly large numbers of people trained not to object seemed a dream market. But deep down even the cult of obedience cannot short-circuit the powers of intelligent observation. Chinese scientists have reported that genetically engineered cotton, after the first five years of its use, has become an unmitigated disaster. Cotton is to Chinese agriculture what canola was to ours. The number of pesticide-resistant pests has increased and is out of control. Worse, the amount of pesticides has escalated beyond that poor economy’s ability to pay for. They are recommending returning to their Confucian dictum: “The old tried and true ways are ever the best.” The Organic Advance Those scientists of the world, who are not paid by the industry, issued a statement recently signed by 136 of them, many Nobel laureates among them, coming from 27 countries: “Government advisory committees lack sufficient representation from independent scientists not linked to the industry,” it said. “The result is that an untried, inadequately researched technology has been rushed prematurely to market, while existing scientific evidence of hazards are being suppressed, and little independent research on risks are being carried out.” Among these scientists, incidentally, are those who originally developed the technology with which genetic engineering is done today. Here two issues converge, as Dr. N. Olivieri pointed out at the BioJustice conference. As the biotech giants are aiming to control both agriculture and healthcare, their success depends on scientists whom the literally own body and soul. Thus the pharmaceutical company Apotex tried to silence Dr. Olivieri when she noted potentially fatal adverse effects in a drug she had been contracted to research. Under Apotex’s pressure the University of Toronto fired her, as did Sick Children’s Hospital where the study was centered (reinstated now). Apotex sued her for $ 20 million in potentially lost sales. Scientists from all over the world were in uproar and voiced their condemnation. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) published their “Olivieri Report” this year and advised government to take immediate steps to disconnect the interests of industry from those of research. Dr. Olivieri received a standing ovation at BioJustice, for indeed our hope lies with people who will not bend. Since our government supports biotechnology of all varieties, medical as well a agricultural, with immense subsidies in the face of negative public opinion (more than 70% of Canadians don’t want biotech foods), a letter from you and me to those who pretend to be acting in our interest in Ottawa is in order: call 1-866-599-4999, or fax 613-941-6900, or e-mail pmo@pm.gc.ca and tell our Prime Minister we don’t want our tax dollars to support this diabolical experiment. We ought to tell him also that we support the May 2000 federal environment report that recommended subsidies and tax deductions for farmers who want to convert to organic farming. In a daring and timely move, the organic farmers of Saskatchewan are suing Monsanto and Aventis, the two biotech crop giants, demanding “compensation for the damage caused to certified organic farmers resulting from the introduction of genetically engineered canola into the rural environment.” They are also asking for an injunction to prevent the introduction of GE wheat. They assert the “right to grow organic crops, to serve organic markets, to eat GMO free foods, and to farm organically.” Their legal claim is that “when Aventis and Monsanto introduced their GE canola, they knew or ought to have known of this crop’s ability to cross-pollinate, spread and contaminate the environment, including organic fields.” Indeed, this may very well be one of the most important court cases in all of Western legal history. Your donation can be sent to SOD-OAPF, Box 1, Lisieux, SK, S0H 2R0. The good news is that organic farming is growing at a rate of 25% a year worldwide, said Gunner Rundgren, the current president of the international organic farming federation, IFOAM. There are now 750 organic farming organizations in 103 countries of which 50% are in Europe, 20% in Asia, 20% in Africa and less than 10% in the US and Canada. In May 2001 there were 2,230 organic farmers in Canada with Saskatchewan having the lion’s share of 773. Ontario has more than 400. The problem is that there aren’t enough of them to meet growing consumer demand. At the Guelph conference some myths were also dispelled. For example, European conventional farmers use more chemical fertilizers and pesticides than US farmers do. France uses the most among European countries, but has started to put on the breaks. On the other hand, the Netherlands has decreed that within 10 years no pesticides may be used in agriculture at all! In May 2001, led by Denmark, the agriculture ministers of Europe signed a declaration committing European farming towards 100% organic agriculture. Germany went through the most dramatic conversion experience: when Mad Cow Disease hit Germany, the agriculture minister resigned, the new one was a member of the Green Party and, responding to public demand as democratic government should, within a week of taking office committed the country to an organic farming policy. The Quebec minister of agriculture declared last year that “organic is the way of the future”, moving the province into supporting the transition. Brazil was the first country to refuse biotechnology completely, and they have now taken our worldwide canola market as theirs is not genetically polluted. But “organic” purity is itself a troubled issue because the air and water carries pesticide residues. The then editor of Alive Magazine, Rodhy Lake told an audience in Ottawa two years ago, that her home-grown organic produce showed it had 10% pesticide residues compared to supermarket produce. The qualitative analysis of organic foods does show that these crops contain dramatically less toxic residues compared to conventionally ones. ( See the peer-reviewed journal “Food Additives and Contaminants”; can be downloaded for free from www.biosciencearena.com .) A Swiss study comparing over 21 years the yields of organic and conventional farming showing that the production of organic farming requires about 50% less energy, while the total yields are about 20% less than achieved by conventional methods. And if the nutritional quality alone were to decide this war, it would be won already: the “European Journal of Nutrition” (vol. 40, 2002) and the “Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine” published their respective studies, based on 300 comparisons, and showed that organically crown foods have a higher nutritional content 85% of the time. For example, organic crops have 29% more magnesium, 27% more vitamin C, 21% more iron, 26% more calcium. An old saying has it that the best revenge on one’s enemies is to live well. This war can be won by political action and by refusing the phoney stuff and by eating well. Sources: J. Humphrys, The Great Food Gamble, Hodder & Stoughton, 2001 |
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K. Sullivan, Organic Living in 10 Simple Lessons, Barron’s 2001 |
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