2012 Farm Bill: Zombies of the House and Vampires of the Senate

Moderator’s Note: We hate to bring you this Halloween special, but with this post, we launch a series of reports following developments and offering critical analysis and alterNative policy recommendations on the 2012 Farm Bill. 

We start with a disturbing piece from our friends and colleagues at Food Democracy Now! While we have yet to confirm these allegations, if true then this is clearly yet another example of the perverse and systematic violation of our Constitutional rights to participate as a public and as farmers and consumers in shaping the public policy discourse for our nation's agricultural policies and spending priorities in a period that is unleashing deep cuts that could further damage access to safe and culturally appropriate food to a growing majority of people in America. 

The Food Democracy Now! report alleges that  a secretive group of U.S. Senators and Representatives are meeting with corporate agribusiness lobbyists behind closed doors to work on a secret deal for the 2012 Farm Bill that would effectively shut down public participation before the debate really gets underway. This is a direct threat to consumers, farmers, farm workers, food service workers, and the environment and is also hardly in the spirit of the open debate and deliberation one would expect in a democracy. This story further confirms our suspicion that we live in a Republic of Property, one that is based on the rule of private [corporate] property rights rather than the equitable rule of law.

Zombies of the Haunted House; 

Vampires of the Seditious Senate

For the past several weeks, rumors of a “Secret Farm Bill” being hatched behind closed doors in Washington between only a handful of legislators and industrial agriculture lobbyists have been leaking out of Congress. Last week those rumors hit panic mode.

According to multiple sources in DC, the most corporately entrenched Senators and Representatives of the Ag committees are locked behind closed doors on Capitol Hill with agribusiness lobbyists trying to carve up the 2012 Food and Farm Bill in an intentionally hurried process that will kill any needed reforms for protecting family farmers, the environment and improving healthy food opportunities for all Americans.

If corporate greed gets its way, family farmers and food reformers will possibly be locked out of the conversation on reforming food and farming policy until 2017. It’s no wonder people are marching in the streets!

Click here to make a call to kill the “Secret Farm Bill”. We need your voice today - now more than ever. If you support local family farmers and sustainable agriculture for our future, please join this call to action.

If you think the ghouls of Halloween are serving up a frightening brew, wait until these creepy members of Congress write your Food and Farm Bill behind Closed Doors!

The Four Horsemen of the Farm Bill Apocalypse

Zombies of the Haunted House:

1. Frank Lucas – (R-OK) Current Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee

Lucas is so in the tank for industrial agriculture that earlier this year he proposed a hearing on the “over-regulation of agricultural biotechnology”.

Not surprisingly, during the 2009-2010 election cycle, Lucas received more than $317,000 from agribusiness interests, including $16,000 from Monsanto and $15,000 from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. What do you think they want now?

2. Collin Peterson (D-MN) Former Chair of the House Agriculture Committee

Peterson is widely known as “Cargill” Peterson for his love of defending industrial agriculture and has taken millions of dollars from agribusiness firms during his career; including $19,999 from Monsanto and $21,750 from the American Farm Bureau during the 2010 election cycle.

Vampires of the Seditious Senate:

3. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) Chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee

Rumors point to Stabenow as leading the push for the “Secret Farm Bill” because she doesn’t want to have to deal with crafting this complicated piece of federal legislation during an election year.

If you think Stabenow’s willingness to throw out real reform of U.S. food policy because she doesn’t want the “headache” during an election season, consider the fact that during the 2012 election cycle, from 2007 to now, Stabenow has pocketed more that $483,000 in agribusiness PAC and individual donations and is currently the top recipient of Agricultural Services & Products donations. Priceless! Kind of gives new meaning to the term, “Perks of the Senate”.

4. Pat Roberts – (R-KS) Senate Agriculture Committee – Ranking Member

Roberts is a known industrial ag favorite, that during the 2009 Senate confirmation hearing of Secretary Vilsack he went so far as to draw an outrageous picture of organic farmers as GQ reading porch sitters. If that weren’t bad enough, Roberts has already grabbed more than $706,000 in agribusiness cash for the 2012 election cycle, including political donations from the National Corn Growers Association, DuPont, Pfizer and Syngenta.

Click here if you want to tell these congressional leaders that they work for the American people and that you want to end the collusion between corporate greed and Congressional misdeeds. Tell Congress to Kill the Secret Farm Bill today!

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/483?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=10

Why the 2012 Food and Farm Bill Matters

There is nothing more essential and personal to us than the food we eat and the water we drink. Agriculture policy dictates the quality, availability and health of our food resources. U.S. food and ag policy is far-reaching throughout the world, determining the fate of all those who eat.

Typically the Farm Bill is conducted every five years, involving a lengthy process of public hearings in Congress and meetings with stakeholders across the country. At risk with this secret deal are vital reform programs of commodity subsidies (already on the chopping block), funding for conservation, organic conversion and important nutrition programs. 

While members of Congress are working to find ways of cutting the budget, the currently proposed cut of $23 billion from the 2012 Farm Bill by members of Congress ag committees and the $33 billion in cuts proposed by the White House should not be made in haste or in any secretive backroom bargain that excludes the voice of the American farmer and eaters while taking advice from agribusiness lobbyists.

In a democracy, we deserve transparency and accountability, and in few places is this more personal or necessary than determining our food policy, where all stakeholders deserve a seat at the table, not simply those with the largest financial interest.

Click here to make a call to kill the “Secret Farm Bill”. We need your voice today - now more than ever. If you support local family farmers and sustainable agriculture for our future, please join this call to action.

We are committed to this fight now, more than ever - please join us. Together, our voices will create the future we hope for.

Thanks for being a part of the solution and participating in food democracy,

Dave, Lisa and the Food Democracy Now! Team

Sources:

1. "Keith Good Farm Policy: Farm Bill Deal Offered to Super Committee", FarmPolicy.com, October 17, 2011

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/474?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=13

2. "Quick and dirty: Congress may rewrite the Farm Bill in two weeks", Grist, October 24, 2011

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/475?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=15

3. "Representative Frank D. Lucas 2009-2010, Sectors, 200-2010", OpenSecrets.org

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/476?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=17

4. “Representative Frank D. Lucas 2009 – 2010, Top 20 Contributors,” OpenSecrets.org

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/477?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=19

5. “Hearing to review the causes and consequences of government over-regulation of agricultural biotechnology”, House Committee on Agriculture,  August 4, 2011

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/478?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=21

6. “Representative Collin C. Peterson 2009 – 2010, Top 20 Contributors”, OpenSecrets.org

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/479?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=23

7. "Senator Deborah Ann Stabenow 2007 - 2012 Top Industries", OpenSecrets.org

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/480?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=25

8. "Senator Pat Roberts 2007-2012, Top Industries", OpenSecrets.org

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/481?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=27

9. "Show Senator Pat Roberts that small farmers aren't little GQ-reading dilettantes", January 14, 200, Ethicurean

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/482?akid=398.324596.xdqUiG&t=29

GEO Watch: Little Monsters

Moderator's Note: We are posting, courtesy of purefood.org, a report filed by a group of soil scientists that conducted research on the effects of a genetically-engineered version of a naturally occurring soil bacterium known as Klebsiella planticola. This is a cautionary tale worth recalling given the recent approval not just of Monsanto's Roundup Ready Alfalfa but several dozen new transgenic food crops including sweet corn that will soon be on the market. This illustrates how under capitalism even a life-producing activity like farming is distorted to become a form of thanatopolitics - the politics of unregulated death meted out to farm workers and soil organisms alike.

 

Klebsiella-planticola

The Gene-Altered Monster
That Almost Got Away

Web Note: In the early 1990s a European genetic engineering company was preparing to field test and then commercialize on a major scale a genetically engineered soil bacteria called Klebsiella planticola. The bacteria had been tested--as it turns out in a careless and very unscientific mannner--by scientists working for the biotech industry and was believed to be safe for the environment. Fortunately a team of independent scientists, headed by Dr. Elaine Ingham of Oregon State University, decided to run their own tests on the gene-altered Klebsiella planticola. What they discovered was not only startling, but terrifying-- the biotech industry had created a biological monster--a genetically engineered microorganism that would kill all terrestrial plants. After Ingham's expose, of course the gene-altered Klebsiella planticola was never commercialized. But as Ingham points out, the lack of pre-market safety testing of other genetically altered organisms virtually guarantees that future biological monsters will be released into the environment. Moreover it's not only genetic engineering that poses a mortal threat to our soil ecology, the soil food web, as Ingham calls it. Chemical-intensive agriculture is slowly but surely poisoning our soil and our drinking water as well.

This article originally appeared in the Green Party publication Synthesis/Regeneration 18 (Winter 1999)

Ecological Balance and Biological Integrity

Good Intentions and Engineering Organisms that Kill Wheat

by Elaine Ingham, Oregon State University


A genetically engineered Klebsiella-planticola had devastating effects on wheat plants while in the same kind of units, same incubator, the parent bacteria did not result in the death of the wheat plants.

Consider that the parent species of bacteria grows in the root systems of every plant that has been assessed for Klebsiella's presence. The bacterium also grows on and decomposes plant litter material. It is a very common soil organism. It is a fairly aggressive soil organism that lives on exudates produced by the roots of every plant that grows in soil. This bacterium was chosen for those very reasons to be engineered: aggressive growth on plant residues.

Field burning of plant residues to prevent disease is a serious cause of air pollution throughout the US. In Oregon, people have been killed because the cloud from burning fields drifted across the highways and caused massive multi-car crashes. A different way was needed to get rid of crop residues. If we had an organism that could decompose the plant material and produce alcohol from it; then we'd have a win-win situation. A sellable product and get rid of plant residues without burning. We could add it to gasoline. We could cook with it. We could drink grass wine-although whether that would taste very good is anyone's guess. Regardless, there are many uses for alcohol.

So, genes were taken out of another bacterium, and put into Klebsiella-planticola in the right place to result in alcohol production. Once that was done, the plan was to rake the plant residue from the fields, gather it into containers, and allow it to be decomposed by Klebsiella-planticola. But, Klebsiella would produce alcohol, which it normally does not do. The alcohol production would be performed in a bucket in the barn. But what would you do with the sludge left at the bottom of the bucket once the plant material was decomposed? Think about a wine barrel or beer barrel after the wine or beer has been produced? There is a good thick layer of sludge left at the bottom. After Klebsiella-planticola has decomposed plant material, the sludge left at the bottom would be high in nitrogen and phosphorus and sulfur and magnesium and calcium-all of those materials that make a perfectly wonderful fertilizer. This material could be spread as a fertilizer then, and there wouldn't be a waste product in this system at all. A win-win-win situation.

But my colleagues and I asked the question: What is the effect of the sludge when put on fields? Would it contain live Klebsiella-planticola engineered to produce alcohol? Yes, it would. Once the sludge was spread it onto fields in the form of fertilizer, would the Klebsiella-planticola get into root systems? Would it have an effect on ecological balance; on the biological integrity of the ecosystem; or on the agricultural soil that the fertilizer would be spread on?

One of the experiments that Michael Holmes did for his Ph.D. work was to bring typical agricultural soil into the lab, sieve it so it was nice and uniform, and place it in small containers. We tested it to make sure it had not lost any of the typical soil organisms, and indeed, we found a very typical soil food web present in the soil. We divided up the soil into pint-size Mason jars, added a sterile wheat seedling in every jar, and made certain that each jar was the same as all the jars.

Into a third of the jars we just added water. Into another third of the jars, the not-engineered Klebsiella-planticola, the parent organism, was added. Into a final third of the jars, the genetically engineered microorganism was added.

The wheat plants grew quite well in the Mason jars in the laboratory incubator, until about a week after we started the experiment. We came into the laboratory one morning, opened up the incubator and went, "Oh my God, some of the plants are dead. What's gone wrong? What did we do wrong?" We started removing the Mason jars from the incubator.
 
When we were done splitting up the Mason jars, we found that every one of the genetically engineered plants in the Mason jars was dead. Wheat with the parent bacterium, the normal bacterium, was alive and growing well. Wheat plants in the water-only treatment were alive and growing well.

From that experiment, we might suspect that there's a problem with this genetically engineered microorganism. The logical extrapolation from this experiment is to suggest that it is possible to make a genetically engineered microorganism that would kill all terrestrial plants. Since Klebsiella-planticola is in the root system of all terrestrial plants, presumably all terrestrial plants would be at risk.

So what does Klebsiella-planticola do in root systems? The parent bacterium makes a slime layer that helps it stick to the plant's roots. The engineered bacterium makes about 17 parts per million alcohol.

What is the level of alcohol that is toxic to roots? About one part per million. The engineered bacterium makes the plants drunk, and kills them.

But I am not trying to say that all genetically engineered organisms are technological terrors. What I am saying is that we have to test each and every genetically engineered organism and make sure that it really does not have unexpected, unpredicted effects.

They have to be tested in something that approximates a real world situation. I've worked with folks in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and I know the tests the EPA performs on organisms. They often begin their tests with "sterile soil." But if it's sterile, then it's not really soil. Soil implies living organisms present. If you use "sterile soil" and add a genetically engineered organism to that sterile material, are you likely to see the effects of that organism on the way nutrients are cycled, or on the other organisms in that system? No, you're not likely to. So it's probably no surprise that no ecological effects are found when they test genetically engineered organisms in sterile soil. They really need to put together testing systems, which assess the effects of the test organism on all of the organisms present in soil.

What do we mean, organism-wise, when we talk about soil? Agricultural soil should have 600 million bacteria in a teaspoon. There should be approximately three miles of fungal hyphae in a teaspoon of soil. There should be 10,000 protozoa and 20 to 30 beneficial nematodes in a teaspoon of soil. No root-feeding nematodes. If there are root feeding nematodes, that's an indicator of a sick soil.

There should be roughly 200,000 microarthropods in a square meter of soil to a 10-inch depth. All these organisms should be there in a healthy soil. If those conditions are present in an agricultural soil, there will be adequate disease suppression so that it is not necessary to apply fungicides, bactericides, or nematicides. There should be 40 to 80% of the root system of the plants colonized by mycorrhizal fungi, which will protect those roots against disease.

What happens when you apply the most fungicides and pesticides to soil? In every single case where we have looked at foodweb effects of pesticides, there are non-target organism effects, and usually very detrimental effects. The sets of beneficial organisms that suppress disease are reduced. Organisms that cycle nitrogen from plant-not-available forms into plant-available forms are killed.

Organisms that retain nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, magnesium, calcium, etc. are killed. Organisms that retain nutrients in the soil are killed. Once retention is destroyed, where do those nutrients go? They end up in our drinking water; or end up in our ground water. You and I as taxpayers have to pay in order to clean up that water so we can drink it.

Wouldn't it be much wiser to keep those organisms present in the soil so those nutrients would be retained and become available to the next crop of plants instead of ending up in our drinking water where we have to pay in order to have clean drinking water? How do you do that? You get the
organisms back into the soil. If you grow the proper number and types of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes and microarthropods, mycorrhizal fungi in the root systems of the plants, you can do away with pesticides. It's been done. We can reduce significantly the amount of fertilizer that goes into that soil. In experiments that have been done all over the country, all over the world, inorganic fertilizer inputs have been reduced, or are not added at all, without reduction in plant growth. Where green manure or legumes are not available, approximately 40 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer, once every four years, are still necessary.

Let's talk about why today's conventional agricultural systems require such massive inputs of pesticides and fertilizers. When a healthy soil is first plowed out of native grassland, for example, the disease-suppressive bacteria and fungi, protozoa and nematodes are present. For the first 5 to
15 years after plowing native grassland you don't have to use any pesticides. No fertilizers are required because there is natural nutrient cycling, natural nitrogen retention, and disease suppression. As you plow that soil, you start to kill the beneficial organisms, you lose the organic matter, and you lose the food to feed the beneficial organisms. After about 10 to 15 years, if you're not adding back adequate plant residue to feed those organisms, you lose them, and start having significant disease problems. Then you either leave that land and farm elsewhere, or in the US, we used fertilizers to keep yields high. As more and more of the organisms were killed by the salt effect of the fertilizers, and the constant plowing mined out more and more of the organic matter, starving the beneficial organisms to death, disease became a serious problem. And we started using more and more pesticide to knock the disease back.

In California, around 1955, those disease problems became so severe that they thought they would lose agricultural production. So the University of California came up with a better way to kill those disease-causing organisms. It's called methyl bromide. This chemical kills disease-causing organisms-but it also kills everything else. There is very little natural disease suppression going on in agricultural soils in California.

How many organisms are left in strawberry fields that have been methyl-bromided 2 to 3 times a year for the last 14 years? There are no microarthropods left. There are no beneficial nematodes left; only root feeding nematodes. And there is nobody to control root-feeding nematodes in those soils. How many protozoa are left in that soil? None. You cannot cycle nutrients. There is nobody home to make nitrogen plant-available. So what do you have to do? You have to add fertilizer. We force ourselves to have to add fertilizer. We have no other choice if you're going to grow those plants in those soils.

How many fungi do you have left in that soil? No beneficial fungi-they're all disease-causing. How many bacteria are left? All are gone, except for 100 per gram of soil. We should have 600 million per teaspoon in that soil; we have 100 left. There is nothing left to retain nitrogen in those soils, nothing. So you apply fertilizer. What happens to the fertilizer? Whatever fertilizer contacts the roots of the plants is indeed taken up; the rest of it flushes through the soil into the ground water, into the river.

Take Santa Maria River in California as an example. This land has had methyl bromide applied 2 to 3 times a year for the last 14 years or more. Fertilizer is applied as sidedress when strawberries are planted. About two weeks later, the river goes up to around 150 parts per million nitrates. What is the toxic level for nitrate for humans? Ten parts per million nitrates is what the EPA tells us. It used to be three parts million but that level was increased. Can you drink that water in the river in the Santa Maria valley? Not unless you'd want to die. You would destroy your kidneys pretty fast if you drank that water. It is high in nitrate. It is so toxic that you can't even put that water back on the plants. The high nitrate burns the plants.

We have a simple solution for this problem. Get the right kind of organisms, the right numbers of organisms, back in the soil and let them start performing their functions again. Put food for the organisms back into the soil; put the organisms back into the soil. It's that simple. Send us your soil samples and we can tell you whether you have that food web in your soil.

How are you going to fix that set of organisms it if you don't have a healthy foodweb? We can help you with that question. We can indeed move towards that time when we really don't need pesticides anymore; where you only apply fertilizer once every four years and in very small amounts. We can move to a sustainable agriculture. It takes time and effort, but it is possible.

This article is adapted from the presentation the author gave on July 18, 1998 at the First Grassroots Gathering on Biodevastation: Genetic Engineering.

See also: Holmes, M.T., Ingham, E.R., Doyle, J.D., & Hendricks, C.W. (1998). Effects of Klebsiella-planticola SDF20 on soil biota and wheat growth in sandy soil. Applied Soil Ecology, 326, 1-12.

SOUTH CENTRAL FARM UPDATE

SCF to Occupy LA City Hall

Farmers Join with Central–Alameda Residents

To Halt Sale of Last Piece of Urban Farm‏                          

SOUTH CENTRAL FARMERS

Tezozomoc 818 527-6384

For immediate release

Info (800) 249-5240

Time:                     Monday, October 24, 2:00pm - 5:00pm

Location:              Los Angeles City Hall, Room 1010, 200 N. Spring St., Los Angeles, CA 90012

Los Angeles Councilmember and Mayoral candidate Jan Perry just can't give her constituents in the Central-Alameda neighborhood a break.  On Monday, October 24, Perry will meet with City Council’s Budget & Finance Committee to propose that the Central-Alameda residents give up a proposed City soccer field at 41st and Long Beach for improvements to another park eight blocks away.

The South Central Farmers, who lost their Farm of two generations to Perry's determination to industrialize the east side of her district, will be at the meeting with area residents to demand that the City fulfill its promise to the community and build the park.

The proposed soccer field isn't just any park.  It's what remains of the South Central Farm, just 2.7 of the original 14 acres that provided this impoverished neighborhood in the heart of a food desert with fresh produce.  Six years ago, the City sold the South Central Farm, the largest urban farm in the United States, for $5.3M and stood by as developer Ralph Horowitz demolished it.  The City left the neighborhood with only the promised soccer field.

Again with the help of Perry and his allies on the City Council, Horowitz now hopes regain the 2.7 acres to sell all of original fourteen acres as a block to PIMA Development, a garment industry conglomerate rumored to be affiliated with Forever 21.  In an Associated Press story, the San Jose Mercury News reported that PIMA is requiring all 14 acres as a condition of sale.  In exchange, the approximate $3M price tag for the 2.7 acres will, according to Perry, be invested in improvements to Fred Roberts Park.

New buyers who are attempting to buy the land have set conditions to overcome Forever 21’s 2008 failure of attempting to build a warehouse; by requesting that the 2.7 acres allocated for park use in 2003 settlement with Jan Perry and the City of LA be also sold to them.  Jan Perry has spearheaded the push for erasing the last vestiges what was once the largest urban farm in the United States.  The City has deployed its discursive spin by calling this project the “PIMA development”.  This conglomeration is nothing more than the Oedipal child of Forever 21.  The PIMA development is short for Poetry, Impact, Miss Me, and Active, which are widely known as subcontractors for Forever 21.

In 2008, Forever 21 proposed to place a massive trucking facility on the 41st and Long Beach location.  The City Planning Commission issued a preliminary declaration that the planned development had no significant environmental effects.  Alarmed residents of the working class community, organized by the South Central Farmers Support Committee, collected thousands of signatures, packed a Planning Department meeting to overflowing, and testified for hours in opposition to the proposed development.  The Planning Commission reluctantly reversed itself, requiring an Environmental Impact Report before construction for the shipping center could begin.  The project was shelved.

A similar project, proposed by the PIMA group, emerged about six months ago, and Perry appears to be pushing for the sale of the land before the state ends funding for Community Development Grants.  Without state aid, the land has little value to developers while large swaths of developed industrial warehouses and transportation centers are vacant.  Because the land originally belonged to the Harbor Commission, Perry took the matter to them in August.  In the face of pressure by the Farmers and residents at their meeting, the Harbor Commission punted and sent the matter to City Council without a recommendation.

Giving up their source of healthy food added $5.3M to City coffers, and still their Councilmember doesn't think they deserve two parks in the neighborhood.  Area residents believe otherwise.  On October 13th, Perry's staffers were run out of a meeting at Fred Roberts Park where they were pitching the sale of the soccer field land.  Residents complained of being a “sacrificial community” for the developer friends of politicians. Silvia Duran, a 30-year resident near the proposed park, declared, “Jan Perry has always ignored us when we have complained of all the traffic and noise!”

Jan Perry has allied herself with Pueblo Del Rio low income housing complex.  She will bus in residents from the housing complex and Fred Roberts Park for a free lunch before the Budget and Finance Committee meeting.  However, most residents are determined to halt the industrialization of their neighborhood, with its attendant home value depreciation, impaired health, and noise and diesel pollution.  The neighborhood lies along the Alameda Corridor, a major truck route carved out of low-income residential and commercial neighborhoods over the past two decades between the Los Angeles Harbor and downtown rail lines.  The taking of the South Central Farm is the most recent of a long history of land transfers, including the Cornfields, Chavez Ravine, and the Ballona Wetlands, from publicly held quality of life spaces to commercial and industrial developers.

In the 2003 sale of the Farm land, the City sold Horowitz the land for something slightly more than $500,000 per acre. Today, with the real estate market in shambles and vacant warehouses littering Los Angeles' industrial and commercial zones, Horowitz has agreed to contribute close to $1.4 million per acre to Perry's district, roughly three times the rate he and the city negotiated in the initial deal at the apex of the real estate boom.

In an L.A. Superior Court hearing challenging the sale of the Farm in 2006, Perry testified that the soccer field would be a public benefit mitigating the loss of the Farm. But in a recent letter to the Harbor Commissioners arguing now for the sale of the soccer field, NBC LA reports that Perry acknowledged the consequences of industrial development on her residents, declaring that the soccer field is impractical because of area pollution and, ironically, citing the same 2008 Environmental Impact Report that had stalled the project before.  Removing the planned park could reduce some costs for mitigating construction and operation pollution for the developer and the buyer, but it would have no effect on long-term neighborhood pollution exposure.

Until the South Central Farm was demolished, its healthy food, healthy air, and healthy lifestyle were palpable relief for residents overwhelmed with nearby industrialization. When Horowitz posted an eviction notice on the Farm's chain link fence, hundreds of supporters occupied the Farm, and city residents, celebrities, and farmers from around the globe pressured the City Council to preserve the Farm. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa interceded between the Farmers and Horowitz until the developer declined a full-price offer from area non-profits to save the Farm.  That chapter of the Farm history is the subject of several documentaries. The Farm remains an international symbol of low-income residents creating their own environmental justice.

The Blue River Declaration

The Blue River Declaration: An Ethic of the Earth

A truly adaptive civilization will align its ethics with the ways of the Earth. A civilization that ignores the deep constraints of its world will find itself in exactly the situation we face now, on the threshold of making the planet inhospitable to humankind and other species.  The questions of our time are thus: What is our best current understanding of the nature of the world?  What does that understanding tell us about how we might create a concordance between ecological and moral principles, and thus imagine an ethic that is of, rather than against, the Earth?

What is the world?

In our time, science, religious traditions, Earth’s many cultures, and artistic insights are all converging on a shared understanding of the nature of the world: The Earth is our home.  It will always be our only source of shelter, sustenance, and inspiration. There is no other place for us to go. 

The Earth is part of the creative unfolding of the universe.  From the raw materials of the stars, life sprang forth and radiated into species after species, including human beings. The human species is richly varied, with a multitude of persons, cultures, and histories. We humans are kin to one another and to all the other beings on the planet; we share common ancestors and common substance, and we will share a common fate.  Like humans, other beings are not merely commodities or service-providers, but have their own intelligence, agency, and urging toward life.

We live in a world of nested systems.  Living things are created and shaped by their relationships to others and to the environment.  No one is merely an isolated ego in a bag of skin, but something more resembling a note in a multidimensional symphony. 

The world is dynamic at every scale. By processes that are probabilistic and often unpredictable, the world unfolds into emergent states of being.  Our time of song and suffering is one such point in time.  The life systems of the world can be resilient, having the ability to endure through change.  But changes create cascades of new events. When small changes build up and cross thresholds, sudden large transformations can occur. Thus the world in its present form -- the world we love and inhabit -- is contingent.  It may be, or it may cease to be.  If the Earth changes in ways that undermine our lives, there is nothing we can do to change it back.

The Earth is finite in its resources and capacities. All its inhabitants live within its limitations and by its rules. And although life on Earth is resilient and robust, rapid irreversible changes and mass extinction events have occurred in the past. As a result of ignoring the Earth’s boundaries, we are on the brink of causing a transformation of the Earth and the sixth great mass extinction.

Our knowledge of the Earth will always be incomplete.  But we know that the world is beautiful.  Its life forms, unique in the universe, are wonderful in their grandeur and detail.  It follows that the world is worthy of reverence, awe, and care.

Who are we humans?

We humans have become who we are through a long process of biological and cultural evolution.  As do many other social species, we possess a complex and sometimes contradictory set of possibilities.  We are competitive and cooperative, callous and empathetic, destructive and healing, intuitive and rational. Moreover, we are creatures of consciousness, emotion, and imagination, beings through whom the universe has evolved the capacity to celebrate its own beauty and explore its own meaning in the languages of science and story. 

We are dependent on the sun and the Earth for everything.  Without warmth, air, water, and fellow beings, we would quickly die.  At the same time, we are co-creators of the Earth as we know it, shaping with our decisions the future of the places we inhabit, even as our relation to those places shapes us. In this way, we are members of a community of interdependent parts.

Humans are beings who search for meaning.   Our beliefs about the origins of the cosmos influence the way we relate to each other, to other living things, and to the habitats we both depend upon and constitute.  Sometimes, we experience wonder and awe at the mysteries of the universe, and fall silent in reverence. Yet, as we strive to comprehend the world, we often divide it into hierarchies of value ― pure/impure, spiritual/material, human/subhuman.   Although we often exclude and exploit those we judge less valuable than ourselves, we yearn for belonging.

We are born to care.  From the first moments of our lives, we seek connection.  We deeply value loving and being loved.  We find comfort in close connection to other people, other species, and to the wild world itself. 

We are adaptable and resilient.  Our imagination gives us the ability to envision alternative futures and to adapt our behaviors toward their achievement.  When we are at our best, we develop cultural systems in which we, other living beings, and ecosystems can flourish. 

We are moral beings.  We have the capacity to reason about what is better and worse, just and unjust, worthy and demeaning, and we have the capacity to act in ways that are better, more just, more worthy, more beautiful.

Because we are these things, we can change.  Because we are these things, change will be difficult.

How, then, shall we live?

Humanity is called to imagine an ethic that not only acknowledges, but emulates, the ways by which life thrives on Earth.  How do we act, when we truly understand that we live in complete dependence on an Earth that is interconnected, interdependent, finite, and resilient? 

Given that life on Earth is interconnected, we are called to affirm that all flourishing is mutual, and that damage to the part entails damage to the whole. Accordingly, our virtues are cooperation, respect, prudence, foresight, and justice.  We have the responsibility to honor our obligations to future generations of all beings, and take their interests into account when we reflect on the consequences of our actions.  To discount the future, to take all we need for our own well-being and leave nothing for others, is unthinkable. We should take only what the Earth offers, and leave as much and as good as we take. To live by a principle of reciprocity, giving as we receive, re-creates the richness of life, even as we partake of it.  Then, our harvests are respectful and thoughtful. We learn to listen, which means that we learn to value congeniality, patience, fairness, and moral courage, which creates the possibility of heroism in the face of disagreement and discord. Moreover, the new ethic calls us to remedy destructive distributions of wealth and power. It is wrong when some are made to bear the risks of the recklessness of others, or assume the burden of others’ privilege, or pay with their health and hopes the real costs of destructive practices.

Given that humanity is inescapably dependent on the Earth for gifts both material and spiritual, we are called to be grateful and humble.  To be grateful is to express joy for the fertility of the Earth, to be attentive to its gifts, to celebrate its bounty, and to accept responsibility for its care.  Humility is based on an understanding of our own roots in the soil; we recognize the danger we face and the damage we do when we get that wrong.  So we are well-advised to be humble about our claims to knowledge; and with art and heart and science, to strive for continuous learning that is open to evidence from all ways of knowing and from the Earth itself. The generosity of the Earth models generosity in our relations with others, and calls for collective outrage when we fail in that duty. A new ethic calls us to defend and nurture the regenerative potential of the Earth, to return Earth’s generosity with our own healing gifts of mind, body, emotion, and spirit. We can find joy and justice in sustaining lives that sustain our own.

Given that the Earth’s resources and resilience are finite, human flourishing depends on embracing a new ethic of self-restraint to replace a destructive ethos of excess.  Greed is not a virtue; rather, the endless and pointless accumulation of wealth is a social pathology and a terrible mistake, with destructive social, spiritual, and ecological consequences. 

Limitless economic growth as a measure of human well-being is inconsistent with the continuity of life on Earth.  It should be replaced by an economics of regeneration. Simple life styles that include thriftiness, beauty, community, and sharing are pathways to happiness. Celebrated virtues are generosity and resourcefulness.

Given that life on Earth is resilient, humanity can take courage in Earth’s power to heal.  We can find guidance in the richness of diverse cultures and ecosystems, if we honor and protect difference.  Equality and justice are necessary conditions for civilizations that endure, and truth-telling has strong regenerative power. Virtues we can embody are human courage, creative imagination, and perseverance in the face of long odds. The effect of humans on the land can be healing; our obligation is to imagine into existence new ways to live that create resilient and robust habitats.  If we can undo some of the damage we have done, this is the best work available to us.  On the other hand, damaging the natural sources of resilience ― degrading oceans, atmosphere, soil, biodiversity ― is both foolhardy and an offense against the future, not worthy of us as rational and moral beings.  If hope fails us, the moral abdication of despair is not an alternative.  Beyond hope we can inhabit the wide moral ground of personal integrity, matching our actions to our moral convictions.  Through conscientious decisions, we can refuse to be made into instruments of destruction.  We can make our lives and our communities into works of art that express our deepest values. 

The necessity of achieving a concordance between ecological and moral principles, and the new ethic born of this necessity, calls into question far more than we might think.  It calls us to question our current capitalist economic systems, our educational systems, our food production systems, our systems of land use and ownership. It calls us to re-examine what it means to be happy, and what it means to be smart.  This will not be easy.  But new futures are continuously being imagined and tested, resulting in new social and ecological possibilities. This questioning will release the power and beauty of the human imagination to create more collaborative economies, more mindful ways of living, more deeply felt arts, and more inclusive processes that acknowledge the ways of life of all beings. In this sheltering home, we can begin to restore both the natural world and the human spirit.

November 2011

The Blue River Quorum

Meeting in the ancient forests of the Blue River watershed in Oregon, the Blue River Quorum includes J. Baird Callicott, Madeline Cantwell, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Kristie Dotson, Charles Goodrich, Patricia Hasbach, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Katie McShane, Kathleen Dean Moore, Nalini Nadkarni, Michael P. Nelson, Harmony Paulsen, Devon G. Peña, Libby Roderick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Fred Swanson, Bron Taylor, Allen Thompson, Kyle Powys Whyte, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Gretel Van Wieren, and Jan Zwicky.  The Quorum was convened by the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word (springcreek@oregonstate.edu) with funding from the Shotpouch Foundation, the Oregon Council for the Humanities, and the USDA Forest Service.

GEO Watch: GMO-Free Seattle Events for World Food Day

Moderator's Note: The Seattle host committee of GMO-Free Washington has organized a series of educational events focused on the theme of "GMO foods" October 18-19.  We invite our Seattle-area readers and followers to attend. This includes a listing of final events during Non-GMO Month in conjunction with World Food Day. Below is their press release.

GMO-FREE SEATTLE LECTURES AND FILMS (OCTOBER)

How much do you REALLY know about genetically modified foods? Are you aware 90% of the food you eat at home and in restaurants includes genetically modified ingredients and is sprayed with Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide? Are you aware that 80% of the (non produce) food in natural foods stores is GMO?

If the food you and your family eat is NOT organic, or labeled non GMO – chicken / turkey or beef OR any food containing: Sugar, Soy (found in almost everything), and Corn or Canola, then 90% of these foods are  likely genetically modified, with the potential to affect your DNA, and have likely been sprayed with Roundup.

Our food supply is in jeopardy and Monsanto is attempting to own the world food supply. Monsanto brought us Agent Orange, sprayed dioxins and owns 90% of seeds that are used to grow sugar (beets), soy, corn and canola.

Please help us by volunteering no matter how much time big or small.

Please join us by sending an email with your contact information to : INFO@GMOFreeSeattle.com or call 206 290-0409, or visit www.GMOFreeSeattle.com, go to: GMO Documents, then go to New GMO reader.

Also check out great short video on webpage: “It’s Time for Food fight With FDA”.

SCHEDULE OF NON-GMO MONTH AND WORLD FOOD DAY EVENTS

Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 7:00 PM

“WHY WE MUST STOP PROLIFERATION OF GMOS” - WITH JEFFREY SMITH Marlene’s Market & Deli Natural Foods, 2565 S. Gateway Ctr. Pl, Federal Way 98003.

Jeffrey Smith, founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology and author of Genetic Roulette and Seeds of Deception will discuss his work in this free talk. More info: (253) 839-0933 - No reservations, please arrive early! (Also see GMO events on 10/19).

Wednesday October 19, 2011, 4:00 to 5:00 PM

GMO RALLY - SEATTLE POST-WORLD FOOD DAY – GMO FREE SEATTLE West Lake Center; 1601 5th Ave; Seattle, WA 98101-3654; (206) 467-1600.

Come celebrate, hear the obstacles.  Bring friends.  Jeffrey Smith – founder Institute for Responsible Technology (IRT); International bestselling author and GMO expert; Goldie Caughlan - (Ex) PCC Nutrition Educator for past 28 years; Phil Bereano – UW Professor Emeritus, Technology and Public Policy; Others TBA.

Please help us by volunteering no matter how much time big or small. Please send email with your contact information to: INFO@GMOFreeSeattle.com or call 206 290-0409; www.GMOFreeSeattle.com, go to:GMO Documents, then go to New GMO reader.

Also check out the great short video on the webpage: “It’s Time for Food fight With FDA”.

Wednesday October 19, 2011, 6:30 PM

JEFFREY SMITH “NAVIGATING A WORLD OF GMOS” at University Christian Church; 4731 15th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98105; 206-522-0169

Jeffrey Smith – founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology (IRT) will speak on “Practical ways to navigate through this GMO infested world...Learn practical tips to eating out in restaurants, shopping in food stores (even natural ones)”. Come early at 6:30 to talk to local Vendors and stores, Taste Non GMO treats and beverages; Pre event - 6:30 (Theo Chocolate anyone??) ; Jeffrey Smith talk - 7PM.

For more information and resources go to: GMO Free Seattle at  www.GMOFreeSeattle.com

FOOD FIGHTS: Hunger Politics and Struggles for Autonomy & Resilience

For many of the world's peoples it makes no sense to be displaced from multigenerational ancestral agroecosystems created by culture and nature together for the self-provisioning of food in exchange for a low-wage starvation  job on land ravished by a monoculture mass producer of organic strawberries for privileged, i.e., spoiled and gluttonous, American consumers.

Moderator's Note: With this post we initiate a new series on FOOD FIGHTS: Hunger Politics and Struggles for Autonomy and Resilience. The series will examine hunger as a longstanding neoliberal capitalist political project that intentionally, and sometimes perhaps inadvertently, punishes tens of millions in the USA and a billion-plus bodies in the Two-Thirds World suffering from malnutrition, hunger, famine, and the loss and disruption of native agroecosystems, foodways, and heritage cuisines.

The political project to homogenize and control the global food system dominated by a handful of multinational corporations and powerful nation states is capitalist at its core and manifest source. This reflects the culmination of five decades of American policies that made food into political weaponry, as Harry Cleaver presciently observed way back in 1977.  As part of this series we will be posting Cleaver's article, "Food, famine, and the international crisis," in ten segments over the course of the next few months. The repost will include comments by ejfood that bring this analysis into contemporary context.

Food as political weaponry became official US policy during the Nixon Administration when Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, declared that food was indeed part of the toolkit of American "diplomacy."  Butz announced this policy in 1974 with the simple statement: "Food is a weapon."

This policy has also involved the imposition of the American corporate agribusiness model of high-input scaled-up monocultures, and more recently of the endless iteration of products delivered by the proponents of the biotechnology and transgenics paradigm. We have covered this aspect over the years - for e.g., in reports on the Gates Foundation and its Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the various transgenic crops marketed by Monsanto through our GEO Watch Series. 

By the time, Butz declared food as political weaponry, indigenous and other marginalized communities were well on their way toward the current epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and myriad other health problems directly linked to the destruction of their food sovereignty and place-based agroecosystems and the imposition of modern westernized diets amidst other forms of structural violence linked to capitalist maldevelopment.

What the Food Fights series proposes to do is examine the two-sided nature of these political conflicts and struggles. Capitalist agriculture is not the only political project around. There is an alterNative political project, fostered and circulated among the world's communities, that focuses on rebuilding or protecting local place-based agri-food systems.

This includes overarching commitments by indigenous and traditional farmers to protect native land race crops, regenerate traditional agroecosystems, and engage in affiliated struggles for genuine "land to the tiller" practices to resist and reverse the concentration of agricultural land under the Green Revolution and now under the current land and crop genome grabs across the Global South by the corporate and governmental sectors from the USA, Europe, China, and other globalizing capitalist nations. 

These varied alterNative struggles are collectively known as the food sovereignty movement and intersect with the broader global environmental justice movements that seek ecological democracy or environmental self-determination for marginalized communities of the poor and First Nations across the planet.

These movements conjoin the sociocultural and ecological sides of sustainability with resilience. They do so by addressing the inequities of class, race, gender, and other capitalist-inscribed differences that rationalize exploitation and environmental degradation and risk, and then linking these to struggles for the autonomy of the common, the place-based communities that are today actively rebuilding local solidarity economies.

These struggles are highly complex and widespread: The iconic example is of course the global grassroots network, La Via Campesina. But there are numerous other forms of movement organization, community-building, and circulation of struggle in the creation of these autonomous food-based solidarity economies. The work of the South Central Farmers Feeding Families in Los Angeles and now Buttonwillow is also an iconic example of the intersection of EJ with food sovereignty. We are already creating or regenerating the post-capitalist food system!

There are also a wide array of bioregional and other geographically-distinct yet overlapping terrains of struggle. The series will envision how alterNative struggles represent strategies and organizational forms that are at once bioregional and post-capitalist. We will explore how the rise of local place-grounded communities of resistance, practicing their constituent power by creating spaces of autonomy, are effectively challenging the long immoral arc of the Age of Empire and its perverse use of food as political weaponry. 

For us, food is a source of political creativity rather than political weaponry. It is an act of creation and reproduction rather than of destruction for accumulation (of monetized wealth). It is an existential condition expressed by the right of all organisms to have access to water and food to live and flourish rather than a death-meting privilege ruled by the eternal "natural" law of the so-called free market. It is a collective and interdependent rather than an individualist and independent endeavor. It is a community rather than commodity relationship. It is relationship as collaboration and regeneration rather than exploitation and degradation. 

This then is a series dedicated to the idea of alterNative food ethics: The diversity of indigenous, decolonial, self- and place-healing practices producing and sharing food as conviviality and exercising our obligations to serve as respectful self-restraining fellow co-inhabitants of Earth, our only home.

To launch this series, I am posting a short piece on the debate between locavorism (eating locally) and cosmovorism (eating globally). I am arguing against an emerging dominant perspective that deceptively makes the case that eating globally can sometimes be more "sustainable" than eating locally.

The debate as currently framed from conventional and even alternative food security vantage points is astonishingly ethnocentric because it dismisses the diverse voices of the food sovereignty movement on the issue of precisely the choices that people want to construct.

Food sovereignty advocates reject the export-oriented cash crop model that privileges American consumer preferences and demand for winter-season organic kiwi, avocados, or heirloom tomatoes.

Food sovereignty movements are focused more on transforming the sociocultural and ecological wrecking ball of Global North organic cosmovorism back into resilient local agri-food systems that can meet the principle of autosuficiencia alimentaria (local food self-sufficiency). For many of the world's peoples it makes no sense to be displaced from multigenerational ancestral agroecosystems created by culture and nature together for the self-provisioning of food in exchange for a low-wage starvation  job on land ravished by a monoculture mass producer of organic strawberries for privileged, i.e., spoiled and gluttonous, American consumers. 

 

Part 1: Locavorism as First-World Food Fetish?

A recent article in the influential Foreign Policy journal begins with the following statement:

"With supermarket chains from Whole Foods to Safeway trumpeting their healthy produce from farmers just down the road, buying local and eating non-genetically modified organic food is surely the best thing for you and the planet. And that's something government should get behind, right?

Actually, no -- these First-World food fetishes are positively terrible for the world's poorest people. If you want to do the right thing, give up on locavorism and organics über alles and become a globally conscious grocery buyer. This should be the age of the "cosmovore" -- cosmopolitan consumers of the world's food." [Emphasis added]

"First World food fetishes." "Cosmovore." What a mouthful.

These two ideas present a fundamentally flawed argument about the political and ecological sources of hunger in the USA and the Two-Thirds World. The logic is flawed in several ways.

We first need to remind the "experts" and pundits that local food WAS a Two-Thirds World invention, that is, until the wrecking ball of the Green Revolution regrettably dismissed and devalued the deep agroecological and ethnoecological knowledge of indigenous farmers. The advent of a return to local foods in the USA was actually largely inspired by the persistence of local food systems and localized cuisines outside the USA and by the rise of movements like La Via Campesina well before the term (or the concepts behind) locavorism became fashionable. 

The people of the Two-Thirds World do not need enlightened assistance from the likes of American and European agricultural experts. They do not need anyone telling them what is or is not terrible.  Reparations for past crimes against the foundations of local agrobiodiversity? Bring it on. Now that would be the type of justice needed before the peoples of Earth engage in reconciliation with Empires past and present.

The "fetish" surrounding food does not spring from locavores asserting unreasonable demands to fulfill their preferences for foods that satiate some privileged appetite for local and organic produce. The real underlying fetishism of food is that the capitalist system transforms food into a commodity -- a wooden-headed thing with a price. Pay or starve. There is no uglier fetishism that the tyranny of the dances with prices imposed by global commodity chains that are created and operated for the benefit of and by the very same forces that habitually use food as political weaponry.

As for the hungry poor of the world becoming "cosmovores," well, USA consumers have already colonized the entire planet to serve our table so we can have avocadoes from Mexico and Chile during the winter. Now take a careful look and see where that has gotten us and the rest of the planet? Climate change? Land degradation? Loss of biocultural diversity? Displacement of indigenous peoples and erasure of their ecological wisdom? Extirpation of native land races? Damage to the genomes of humanity's key cultivars? Production for cash crop exports instead of local food needs? The patenting of living organisms? Increasing hunger? Diminished control by women of their reproductive cycles and health? Do we really need a longer list of some of the consequences of the American version of organic and yet predatory cosmovorism? And we want to continue spreading this "good food is global" gospel?

The Two-Thirds World response in a nutshell? "Go back to eating your own landscapes with all the crops you like. We choose to be self-provisioning and to not go hungry any longer so you can happily eat organic fruits and vegetables in the winter!"

But this is not just about the triumph of organic cosmovorism over food sovereignty's insistence on the need for local self-sufficiency as a fundamental principle. The author of the Foreign Policy article, Charles Kenny, also goes on to celebrate the Transgenics Revolution, or Second Green Revolution as some pundits call it. So, this is not about global organics, but transgenic cosmovorism?

Kenny celebrates the advent of so-called GMO (Genetically-Modified Organism) crops, a term I have long rejected as inaccurate since all plants and animals that are part of our agri-food systems were genetically-modified through millenniums of human practice based on selective breeding and cross-breeding. The extraordinary diversity of land race maize, for example, is a consequence of local practices and place-based iterations of varieties originally developed from a relative of a wild grass that was modified by farmers over generations, continuing to this day, to eliminate the wild grass's shattering qualities and to increase the yield, durability, and nutritional value.

...the very source of threats to this agro-biodiversity is exactly the biotechnology proposed...as the appropriate, more pragmatic, and unbiased approach to ending hunger in the Global South.  That one of the centers of this Transgenics Revolution has failed to resolve hunger in its own communities, the USA itself, is of course not mentioned.

I prefer the term genetically-engineered organisms (GEOs) to emphasize the basic difference between conventional cross-breeding and hybridization and transgenics: The recombinant DNA technology used by biotechnologists crosses the boundaries between plants, animals, micro-organisms, and viruses. The practices that created all the world's crops from wild relatives do not violate these boundaries. 

This is an important distinction because the very source of threats to this agro-biodiversity is exactly the biotechnology proposed by Kenny as the appropriate, more pragmatic, and unbiased approach to ending hunger in the Global South.  That one of the centers of this Transgenics Revolution has failed to resolve hunger in its own communities, the USA itself, is of course not mentioned.

Kenny's article is rather disingenuous and misleading on several points. In the article, the author asserts that The World Health Organization (WHO) recently found that "no effects on human health have been shown" from eating transgenic foods. However, and this is a big caveat, the WHO report notes that while there is no evidence, yet, of adverse impacts on human health from the consumption of GEO foods, the agency also suggests that more independent (third party) research on risks is called for.

My review of the WHO report reveals that Kenny misrepresents the report and the UN organization instead makes the following assertion:

Gene transfer from GM foods to cells of the body or to bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract would cause concern if the transferred genetic material adversely affects human health. This would be particularly relevant if antibiotic resistance genes, used in creating GMOs, were to be transferred. Although the probability of transfer is low, the use of technology without antibiotic resistance genes has been encouraged by a recent FAO/WHO expert panel.

Encouraging transgenic food crops that avoid the use of antibiotic resistance genes is an existing policy for many reasons and Kenny fails to acknowledge that fact among other objections that pose scientifically-based arguments against the risks posed by GEOs.

Also Kenny fails to mention the fierce debates over and the diverse movements aligned against transgenics on the basis of arguments related to the social side of "sustainability." In response to a frequently asked question about the legal implications of transgenic crops and their associated patenting regime, which many critics see as directly threatening the autonomy of plant breeders and seed savers, the WHO declares that:

...intellectual property rights are likely to be an element in the debate on GM foods, with an impact on the rights of farmers. Intellectual property rights (IPRs), especially patenting obligations of the TRIPS Agreement (an agreement under the World Trade Organization concerning trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) have been discussed in the light of their consequences on the further availability of a diversity of crops. In the context of the related subject of the use of gene technology in medicine, WHO has reviewed the conflict between IPRs and an equal access to genetic resources and the sharing of benefits. The review has considered potential problems of monopolization...

This does not sound like a complete endorsement of transgenic crops and the issue of seed savers and plant breeders rights continues to be of tremendous valid concern to people and farmers in the Global South. At the very least, Kenny should have reported on the full WHO position instead of selecting only those parts that resonated with his own conclusions and assumptions.

The fight over food is far from over. What seems clear at this point is that a wide variety of so-called experts and pundits are constantly peddling half-truths and outright distortions or misstatements of fact. The ethical and environmental and health bottom line is this: We are still in the earliest stages of the predictive ecology of transgenics but the food sovereignty movement will not abandon the quest for local food self-sufficiency. It will not forsake and forgo adoption of diversity as resilience for an uncertain top-down corporate-driven process of upscaled transgenic monocultures that will surely lead to the extinction of our planet's most vital life-affirming asset -- biocultural diversity. It will not cede the ethical ground of self-reliance and diversity as keys to resilience to the Global North corporate and consumer beneficiaries of transgenic cosmovorism.

A truly science-based public policy on this issue would embrace the Precautionary Principle and ban these GEOs until the risks have been thoroughly evaluated. But this is not just about the reduction of the risks to public health or threats to the environment including non-GEO crops. This is also about autonomy and the self-reliance of farmers and local land-based communities. The promotion of commercial agricultural biotechnology proceeds without all the evidence necessary for a decision on how to use (or not use) technologies that affect all organisms on the planet, and it proceeds with little regard for the creativity, resilience, and adaptability of local farming communities across the planet.

The beauty of the idea of locavorism in the USA and the rest of the Global North is that we would as consumers and producers stop changing the foods that local and native peoples co-evolved with. We would encourage their autonomy because they have already decided that they embrace agroecology and want to produce for the sake of their own food self-sufficiency.  How can we be against that demand for the basic liberty to decide what the land around you produces and to what aims?

This basically means that locavorism in the Global North allows us to stop exporting environmental violence to other people's local places. We would end our privileged regime of exporting so-called negative externalities to other ecosystems across the planet and this would obviously likely require that we become better stewards of our own local ecosystems, which is a good thing. We would then perhaps reduce our overall ecological footprint on the planet by not exporting environmental violence.

Whether the issue is transgenics or cosmovorism, the food sovereignty movement offers an ethic derived from the deep ecology of the agroecology paradigm. This model is grounded in the principle of local food self-sufficiency as a basic human right and declares that this capacity can only be attained through the restoration of place-based commons, which are the heritage landscapes and ancestral ecosystems that local cultures have co-evolved with.  At stake is nothing less than the autonomy of local place-based communities and the resilience of ecosystems, and this is both a human and an Earth right.