Via Anuradha Mittal at the Oakland Institute, more change that looks remarkably like what we wanted to change from. Executive summary: http://www.stopvilsack.org.
An Action Alert from the Organic Consumers Association
Organic Consumers Association: Vilsack Not “Change We Can Believe In”
WASHINGTON, DC : Announcement that former Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack, has been selected as the new Secretary of Agriculture sent a chill through the sustainable food and farming community who have been lobbying for a champion in the new administration.
“Vilsack’s nomination sends the message that dangerous, untested, unlabeled genetically engineered crops will be the norm in the Obama Administration,” said Ronnie Cummins, Executive Director of Organic Consumers Association. “Our nation’s future depends on crafting a forward-thinking strategy to promote organic and sustainable food and farming, and address the related crises of climate change, diminishing energy supplies, deteriorating public health, and economic depression.”
The Department of Agriculture during the Bush Administration failed to promote a sustainable vision for food and farming and did not protect consumers from the chemical-intensive toxic practices inherent to industrial agriculture. While factory farms and junk food have been subsidized with billions of tax dollars, the US industrial farm system has released massive amounts of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and increased our dependence on foreign oil.
The Secretary of Agriculture is responsible for directing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its $97 billion annual budget, including the National Organic Program, food stamp and nutrition programs, agriculture subsidies, and the Forest Service.
While Vilsack has worked to restrain livestock monopolies, his overall record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs, also known as factory farms). Vilsack’s support for unsustainable industrial ethanol production has already caused global corn and grain prices to skyrocket, literally taking food off the table for a billion people in the developing world.
“We fear that this signals Obama’s intentions to rely upon corporate solutions and biotech ‘quick fixes,’ forcing farmers to continue on the pesticide treadmill, rather than creating food systems that nourish people, support family farmers and regenerate natural resources,” said Kathryn Gilje, Executive Director for the Pesticide Action Network. ¯We oppose the confirmation of Tom Vilsack to this post, especially at a time when so much is at stake for the future of food and farming in America.”
Over the past month, Organic Consumers Association members have sent over 20,000 emails to President-Elect Obama’s Transition Team, calling for the appointment of a Secretary of Agriculture who would develop and implement a plan that promotes family-scale farming, a safe and nutritious food system, and a sustainable and organic vision for the future.
“Obama’s choice for Secretary of Agriculture points to the continuation of agribusiness as usual, the failed policies of chemical- and energy-intensive, genetically engineered industrial agriculture,” said Cummins. “Americans were promised “change,” not just another shill for Monsanto and corporate agribusiness. Considering the challenges we collectively face as a nation, from climate change and rising energy costs to food insecurity, we need an administration that moves beyond “business as usual” to fundamental change before it’s too late,” concluded Cummins.
Vilsack’s business as usual positions have included the following:
* Vilsack has been a strong supporter of genetically engineered pharmaceutical crops, especially pharmaceutical corn.
* The biggest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He is also the founder and former chair of the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership.
* When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child for economic development was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning dairy cows.
* The undemocratic 2005 seed pre-emption bill was the Vilsack’s brainchild. The law strips local government’s right to regulate genetically engineered seed.
* Vilsack is an ardent supporter of corn and soy based biofuels, which use as much or more energy to produce as they generate and drive up world food prices, literally starving the poor.
The OCA has launched http://www.stopvilsack.org to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to oppose Vilsack’s Senate confirmation through an online petition.
Additionally, OCA’s nationwide network of 850,000 organic consumers are urging members of Congress to move beyond business as usual and implement a comprehensive strategy for organic food and farming in 2009 and beyond.
Holy crap! His wikipedia page says he travels around in a Monsanto jet!! How far is this guy up the colon of the GMO lobby?
Salazar+Vilsack looks like a double whammy
“Vilsack’s nomination sends the message that dangerous, untested, unlabeled genetically engineered crops will be the norm in the Obama Administration,“ said Ronnie Cummins.
May I have a moment of ignorance here and be directed to some reading material which talks about the objections to GM crops?
Evil_fizz, unlike a lot of environmentalists I don’t have an across the board objection to the notion of altering an organism’s genome. There is a lot of uninformed and alarmist commentary on GMOs, and it can be hard to separate out objections to the current implementations of GMO technology from more non-specific gut-level opposition.
My objection to GMOs as they are being implemented is that the basic motivation for almost every introduction thus far is profit-driven rather than need-driven.
Probably the best-known example is that of Roundup-Ready crops, developed by Monsanto to withstand applications of Monsanto’s patented herbicide Roundup. Theorectical benefits to the farmer include the ability to grow crops without tilling the soil to control weeds. In actuality, weeds develop resistance to Roundup and yields have been shown not to exceed conventional crops reliably. In the meantime, Monsanto not only gets more income from crop-driven sales of Roundup, but from sales of its proprietary seed, and the company portects its seed aggressivley, going so far as to sue farmers whose non-GMO crops have been pollinated by wind drift from neighboring Roundup-Ready farms.
In the meantime, the gene conferring resistance to Roundup doesn’t just transfer into neighboring crops, but also into related weed plant species.
A lot of this trouble stems more from the notion of patenting living things than from the origin of those living things, GMO or not. For instance, without the ability to patent life forms, it’s unlikely that Monsanto would have bothered to come up with “Terminator” seed technology, a genetic modification that prevents the crops in question from setting fertile seed. The idea is that farmers wouldn’t be able to circumvent patent restrictions by saving seed. The reality is that the Terminator genes can migrate into non-patented crops as well, affecting farmers’ ability to save even heirloom, “public domain” seeds. Monsanto has pledged not to use Terminator technology after worldwide public outcry, but they’ve quietly broken that pledge as well, and a handful of other companies have developed equivalent technologies.
Bt corn is another very common GMO, bred with genes from a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, that secretes insecticidal compouns often used in organic gardening. The European corn borer - a moth larva - is a major pest of corn, and Bt is designed to include the gene from that bacterium responsible for making a lepidoptericidal substance. The larva eats Bt corn and dies, not reproducing, and thus suppressing the long-term pest population. It was thought for a while about ten years ago thatpollen from Bt corn posed a threat to other butterflies and moths, especially monarch butterflies. There’s been evidence to suggest that might not be as big a problem as first thought, though many of the findings saying so come from the Bush administration’s USDA, and Bush’s interference with federal science to promote corporate welfare is well-documented. But the Bt gene does escape the patented corn, and prevalence of the gene in other crop populations — as well as wild plants — is a basic precondition for quick evolution of resistance to the insecticide.
The popular conception of genetics is that each trait has a gene that causes it, the unspoken assumption being that genes act in isolation from one another. But genomes are complex systems, and gene expression is affected not only by other genes but also by the environment in which the genome resides, inside the organism or out. Scientist Árpád Pusztai found that when he fed rats potatoes that had been modified to produce a plant toxin known as snowdrop lectin — generally shown to be harmless to mammals — the rats suffered intestinal damage that was not reproduced when he fed rats potatoes mixed with the same amount of snowdrop lectin. His conclusion was that the act of genetic modification itself, not necessarily the action of the implanted gene, had caused the potatoes to become toxic to rats. Making changes in complex systems guarantees unexpected results, and a sane regulatory framework for GMOs would take this into account, using the Precautionary Principle as its guideline.
For his part, Pusztai was attacked by the GMO industry: he was fired from the lab in which he worked and his materials and data destroyed, after the lab received a phone call from Monsanto. The editor of The Lancet, after deciding to runn Pusztai’s peer-reviewed paper on the study, received what he described as a “threatening phone call” from a GMO-friendly member of the Royal Society, which had formed a Swift Boat-style “Rebuttal Unit” to counter criticisms of GMOs.
Which is very much reminiscent of the experience of UC Berkeley’s Ignacio Chapela, who found GMO-drifted genes in theoretically GMO-free maize in Mexico. The GM industry and its partisans waged an unsuccessful “dirty-tricks” style campaign to keep Nature from publishing Chapela’s findings, and then eventually forced Nature to partially retract Chapela’s paper, the first time the journal had ever done such a thing, and based on the objection of a single reviewer.
Shorter me: I have some concerns about the safety of GMOs, based on our rudimentary understanding of how gene expression may be affected by change in a single gene, but not enough to make me want to ban research or completely rule out use of GMOs in daily life altogether. But add the profit motive and the ability to patent lifeforms and you get attempts by individual corporations to corner the worldwide market in one species after another, which is bad for farmers and consumers, and you also get thuggish attempts to subvert independent research, which is bad for science.
Thanks so much for the fuller explanation. I know that the cross pollination issue and the transfer of genes has been extremely problematic with respect to crops, but I was unaware of Pusztai’s research.
The patent issue is its own abyss. There’s a similar set of problems looming in the health care arena and patents on genes for diseases.
Excellent essay, Chris. I hope it doesn’t stay buried in a comments stream.
I second Sherwood. Please make a post out of your fantastic comment Chris.
To add to what Chris said, in developing countries like India, the court system is so backlogged that some cases take decades. If these large companies start suing farmers, the poor farmers will go bankrupt. Maybe before it gets to that, they will all be forced to buy the patented seeds based on economics alone if the large corporations can sell cheap and monopolize the market. When that happens, there is little chance of any regulation in third world countries where corruption is rampant. The precautionary principle may exist on paper, but would be nearly impossible to enforce to any degree.