Seed: From biotech giants' patents and lobbying, to my thankfulness for local organic growers

According to Forbes, Monsanto spent $1.3M on lobbying, just in the first quarter of this year. They lobbied ''Congress, (the) White House, (the) US Trade Representative's office, (the) Federal Trade Commission'' and the ''Agriculture Department'' on ''farm bill provisions and biotechnology'' as well as ''organic standards, patent reform, theft of agricultural seeds, endangered species, timber, greenhouse gas emissions legislation, international trade, ethanol production'' and other things. The crazy thing is that $1.3M to them is spare change.

In other news... It seems the rush is now on for companies to patent plant genes for crops that are tolerant of climate change. As biotech giants continue to buy up more and more seed companies, and farmers' and gardeners' GMO-free options become increasingly scarce, somebody's going to be making a whole heap of money, and it's not gonna be farmers. The time to start saving organic seed is now; I'm putting it on my list of things I need to try out this season.


On a related note, I popped by my local organic health food store, True Food Organics, yesterday and noticed for the first time that they were selling seed. They were kinda buried behind some dried shiitake mushrooms at the back of the far end of the counter, so I'd never noticed them before. That sucks, since there were tomato, basil and pepper seeds I would have loved to have sown, but it's too late in the year now to start from scratch for those. So I picked up some lettuce seed (arugula, Jericho and Black Seeded Simpson) and beans (Contender green beans) from Hope Seeds, as well as some wax beans from Mapple Farms. I couldn't help but bemoan the small selection available; I sure as heck hope to have more luck at the Farmer's Market tomorrow. I wish I knew more local vegetable gardeners.

Amy Goodman and Vanity Fair's James Steel on Democracy Now!

A month ago, I'd written about Vanity Fair's recent weighty exposé on the monstrously huge biotech bully Monsanto. Tuesday's episode of Democracy Now! featured Amy Goodman's interview with James Steele, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who co-authored the Vanity Fair piece. You can listen to (or watch) the interview here, or read the transcript here.

Democracy Now! also provides a link to the five page letter written by a Monsanto PR rep to Steele in response to his original article. In the letter, Monsanto attempts to disassociate itself from its previous incarnations, referring to the companies it was as if it's completely unrelated to them, instead of having evolved from them. The rep absolves the ''new'' Monsanto of any sort of ethical accountability and beats it all down to so much legal mumbo-jumbo, as if changing a company's name cleans the slate.

The rep refuses to discuss anything having to do with their bullying and harassment of farmers in what the rep refers to as ''patent infringement cases'', except to describe the manner they go about investigating claims as this almost genteel process. Then, as if to make the whole thing smell even more benevolent, he adds that funds gained by blackmailing and intimidating farmers go towards agricultural education and scholarships. Nice.

The letter response is well worth reading, just to get a sense of the time and energy that this company puts into manipulating its image. And the interview is a must-see.

Vanity Fair's Monsanto article

Smack dab on the heels of the DVD release of award-winning French journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin's Le Monde selon Monsanto (aka The World According to Monsanto), first aired on the French-German TV network ARTE, Vanity Fair's May issue features a scathing and comprehensive article exposing agribusiness bully Monsanto. It contains everything from personal accounts of their harrassment of farmers to story after story of Monsanto's lengthy history of hiding facts from the public about the toxicity of its products. It needs to be read by anybody not actively avoiding and condemning their products. Now the world's largest seed producer, Monsanto is sytematically snapping up the rest of the competition, company by company.

(The Robin documentary is a must-see, by the way. It's widely available across the internet (e.g. Google video, on different environmental/organic websites, et al.), either in streaming format or for download. It's also available for sale on ARTE's website.)

The Ethicurean and rBGH

I love The Ethicurean. It's not a vegetarian blog, but it's one of my favourite blogs out there now dealing with the ethics of consumption, both in terms of the actual information that's presented, as well as how it's presented . There are different contributors and they discuss topics such as organic farming, food labelling, animal welfare, changes in legislation, the biotech industry, etc. It's definitely worth bookmarking if any of these areas are of concern to you.

Someone posted an open letter to Monsanto there yesterday, listing off the small roadblocks they've been hitting during the lobbying they've been doing in the US to prevent dairy farmers or producers from labelling their milk rBGH-free (rBGH or recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone is manufactured by Monsanto and marketed under the name POSILAC). I was grinning from ear to ear reading it. Monsanto's take on it is that having some dairy products labelled rBGH-free would invariably lead consumers to believe that there's something wrong with it, which would in turn lead to consumers avoiding dairy products coming from cows who've been injected with it.

The Organic Consumers' Association website has a section dealing with the rBGH issue, featuring everything from news stories about it to lists of rBGH-free producers and companies. They also spell out all of the reasons its usage ranges from problematic to outright dangerous, both to cows, as well as to the humans who consume the dairy products coming from cows injected with it.

The Future of Agriculture

Anybody with an interest in the future of agriculture -- of food -- in the US (and the rest of the world, really should read this article about the impact of recent budget cuts by the Bush administration on agricultural research in public institutions, and what it means in terms of agribusiness not only increasing its profits at the US taxpayers' expense, but also ultimately curtailing research into areas of farming that aren't wrapped around patents and genetic engineering.

From the article:

The future of agricultural research at America's land-grant institutions belongs to biotech conglomerates like Monsanto. And it seems likely that it's a future of chemical-dependent, genetically modified, bio-engineered agriculture. In stark contrast to how the federal government and many states are wallowing in red ink, the St. Louis-based Monsanto boasted more than $7 billion in annual sales in 2007 -- simply the latest in four years of record-smashing profits. And so when our president says that the time has come for public land-grant institutions to get cracking at "leveraging nonfederal resources," you can be sure that Monsanto's ears perk.

But, it doesn't take a presidential invitation to get Monsanto to sink its roots in the land-grant system. Those roots are already planted. Iowa State's campus boasts a Monsanto Auditorium and the school offers students Monsanto-funded graduate fellowships on seed policy with a special focus on "the protection of intellectual property rights." Kansas State has spun off Wildcat Genetics, a side company whose purpose is the selling of soybean seeds genetically engineered to survive the application of Roundup® -- the result of a decades long relationship with Monsanto, the pesticide's maker.

It looks like the future of organic farming research in North America will be left in the hands of folks like Dr. Elaine Ingham of Soil Foodweb, Inc.. Unfortunately, Soil Foodweb, Inc. isn't churning out the next generation of agricultural scientists, which is why agribusiness' increasing control of American universities and other academic institutions conducting research should be especially worrisome.

France bans its only homegrown GM crop

I read an article today that made me feel hopeful. It's the old drop in the bucket, I know, but it's still good to see someone standing up to international agri-bullies. France has decided to ban its only genetically modified crop, the MON810 strain of corn introduced to them by the friendly folks at Monsanto. The corn is used for animal feed. A few weeks ago, when France first expressed its intentions to impose a ban, the US-based Biotechnology Industries Organisation (BIO) released a statement calling on the US government and European Union to jump into the fray to intervene. According to BIO:

"This continued moratorium will negatively impact French farmers, consumers, and the environment. Biotech crops have tremendous potential to reduce the environmental impact of farming. By growing biotech crops, farmers reduce pesticide applications and the consumption of fuel and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as reduce the need for plowing to control weeds, which leads to better conservation of soil and water, and a decrease in soil erosion and compaction."

Ah... sure. However, according to Greenpeace, all is not cut and dried concerning MON810's effectiveness, or its possible impact on the insects and organisms (either beneficial or harmful) that are exposed to it. Sale of the seed was banned in Germany earlier last year and this ban has since been lifted, albeit with regulations imposed to purportedly curtail the possibility of cross-contamination of GM crops with conventional crops. Since France took its stance on MON810, over 300 scientists and environmental groups in Spain (Europe's largest grower of GMOs) have come forward with a petition calling for a ban on the cultivation of all GMOs in Spain. The United States' government will likely attempt to retaliate against France with trade sanctions at the WTO level, which it did a few years back in response to Austria's ban on the cultivation and use of MON810. Austria still refuses to lift its ban.

The Organic Consumers Association has a ton of information on GMOs in general, and on Monsanto, more specifically -- its products, its politics and its history. The one thing that is clear in all of this is that agribusiness has become less about consumerism and more about politics, where international trade regulations are now taking away the rights of elected governments to respond to the needs and concerns of their own people. What better way to circumvent consumers' rights to control what they eat than to force it into their stores and sneak it into their products?

As agribusiness continues to fight against the labelling of GMO products, this leaves consumers with the task of struggling to educate themselves about where their food comes from, and whether the manufacturers producing it are using genetically modified ingredients. When it comes to choices, it seems that the only uncomplicated option now left to consumers that doesn't involve doing your homework first is to choose to purchase organic products.

Would you like some Roundup to round off your meal?

So I've been reading about changes coming up in the world of sweets next year. It seems that some major sugar producers in the US have announced that they're going to be switching to genetically modified sugar beets to produce their sugar. The sugar beets in question will be genetically engineered to withstand heavy doses of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide (these crops or then referred to as "Roundup Ready", which means that farmers get to use oodles more herbicide to get from point A to point B -- from their chemical-saturated fields to your sweet tooth. This sugar will make its way into most non-organic processed foods and won't be labeled any differently than the sugar that's being used now. Whatever happens to the US food supply will follow suit in the Canadian food suppy. In fact, here's Health Canada's official response to the whole matter.

The Organic Consumers Association in the US has a letter writing campaign on the go right now to try to convince American Crystal, one of the larger producers involved, to reconsider its decision. Call me cynical, but I honestly don't see it amounting to much, especially considering that this story seems to be staying completely out of the mainsteam media.

Thanks to The Ethicurean for spreading the word about this.