Sustainable Society: Organic Food

Showing posts with label Organic Food. Show all posts

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Genetically licensed crops interfering with farming practices, stealing and privatizing our cultural heritage and threatening food safety

A dream about genetically modified livestock just woke me, and the events in the dream was so haunting I had to come to the computer at 3AM to write. In the dream some farmers were talking about whether the genetics license agreement under which they bought their pigs would allow them to breed pigs they'd bought, and then sell the pigs they'd bred. Breeding livestock is a normal every-day occurrence for farmers and to think they'd not be allowed to do this thing they do every day smacks of scary centralized control scenarios. Its a way of asserting centralized corporatized control over the food we are allowed to eat. And, perhaps the scariest part of genetically modified organisms is not the potential for a messed up food system that gives us bogus food to eat, but the system of corporatized control over the food system that interferes with traditional farming practices from eons which built whole societies.

In the past whole cultures were born upon the ability of farmers to domesticate wild plants and animals through breeding to create useful genetic modifications leading to the modern crops we grow and eat today. For example the modern dairy cow that's so completely placid and easily led around, I can't imagine such a creature could have formed organically in nature, and has to have been the result of eons of selective breeding producing useful genetic modifications to support the plant or animal being useful to farmers. Corn or Potato's or Tomato's, both widely grown and used around the world, are the result of selective breeding to produce useful genetic modifications.

Clearly modern biology says that when you selectively breed plants and animals you're producing genetic modifications. In some cases the selective breeding is in a laboratory and perhaps is bringing genes from other species or something. In some cases companies like Monsanto create species in the laboratory to be resistant to horrendous poisons so that farmers can spray the poisons on crops to kill weeds. The side effect is that weeds naturally select to become resistant to the poisons (a.k.a. superweeds) and there's an ever-escalating battle going on with tougher poisons and genetic modifications to resist the poisons. In some ways the artificial genetic modifications like this are bad for both the quality of the food (what effect is there on us due to the screwed up genetic content of our food), and the side effect of the poisons being poured upon the land.

The other case of selective breeding is the traditional farming techniques of cross fertilization leading to the modern plant and animal species grown at farms around the world. By our modern understanding of biology this sort of natural selective breeding also creates genetic modifications.

There's a bit of disingenuousity in the crowd fighting genetically modified organisms when it's obvious that traditional farming practices also create genetic modifications. Perhaps there needs to be more specificity between artificial selective breeding or artificial genetic modification, and natural selective breeding, but I suppose that sometimes it'll be hard to draw a sharp distinction.

Unfortunately traditional farming techniques are under attack or already destroyed because of farmers being forced into dependence on buying genetically modified seeds from massive agrigiants. Seeds coming from agrigiants come with licenses not unlike the license that comes with proprietary software. The licenses force the farmers to abandon a wide variety of traditional farming techniques such as seed saving, cross breeding, and so on.

One wonders if there will come a day when FDA regulations prevent farmers from selling on the open market foods that aren't grown under license from an agrigiant. This could happen if the agrigiants work with the FDA to prove their seeds meet certain criteria, and that other seeds not matching the criteria cannot be trusted. In other words the FDA might develop a policy framework of forcing farmers to only grow seeds that can be trusted to be safe, and any seed from an unknown source (such as the seed variety developed by their grandfather that works excellently on THEIR land) is strictly verboten.

Agronomic Field Crop Seed Certification from the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association talks about "seed certification is to preserve the genetic identity and purity of field crop seed varieties". They draw a distinction between commercial seed where it's plainly obvious where the seed came from, and other sorts of certified seed where the origin is verified by a certification agency.
Great seed robbery is a piece by Vandana Shiva talking about efforts by agrigiant seed companies to "privatize our rich and diverse genetic origins". She names off several agrigiants who are working on gathering control over seed varieties often starting with traditional seed varieties, and then adding genetic modifications. The seed companies are cross licensing among each other the genetic traits they've developed, in a way that Vandana Shiva describes as "The giant seed corporations are not competing with each other. They are competing with peasants and farmers over the control of the seed supply. And, in effect, monopolies over seed are being established through mergers and cross-licensing arrangements."
Monsanto's corporate history page http://www.monsanto.com/whoweare/pages/monsanto-history.aspx lists cross licensing agreements with several fellow agrigiants
Seed Quality Testing and Certification: Resources Useful in Organic Seed Production - is a list of organizations and information for the U.S. audience
http://www.gmwatch.org/ - Extensive information on genetically modified organisms

If we get back to our farmers growing pigs and wondering about the genetics license agreement ... it's such a normal scene for farmers to take part in, isn't it? To breed pigs with each other? Or cows or whatever? This sort of scene is what converted our ancestors from hunter-gatherers to farmers. The oddity of having a "genetic license agreement" attached to a plant or animal is what interferes with the farmers doing this thing they've been doing for millennia. Namely, through natural genetic modifications (a.k.a. selective breeding) developing strains of plants and animals that are useful and particularly useful in local conditions.

It puts our food system at risk because of monocropping. If a disease were to develop which targeted the monocrop, it could do severe damage to food production.

Another danger is that the seeds are primarily designed by the agrigiants to be non-reproducing. This turns seeds from a renewable resource (where you get new seeds every time you grow a crop) into a non-renewable resource putting farmers into a dependence arrangement with the agrigiants.

It's a way of recreating serfdom without forcing people into actual slavery. The agrigiants upon whom the farmers are dependent for seeds could set any price they want for the seeds, and in broad terms the agrigiants have taken a controlling position over food prices and food quality. They've stolen this position away from the people who developed the food system over millennia, the farmers.

The agrigiants have a big vision for the future of genetically modified organisms that goes way beyond food. They could start concocting plants and animals that are in effect biochemical laboratories for producing anything.

In March 2011 a coalition of family farmers, consumers and other critics of corporate agriculture held a town meeting to protest what they see as unfair consolidation of the nation's food system into the hands of a few multinationals. They contend that global biotech seed leader Monsanto controls the U.S. commercial seed market using unfair, and in some cases illegal, practices. They argue that Monsanto, which develops, licenses and markets genetically altered corn, soybeans and other crops, manipulates the seed market by buying up independent seed companies, patenting seed products, and then spiking prices. The group hopes to re-establish farmer rights to save seed from their harvested crops and replant it. http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/12/us-seeds-antitrust-idUSTRE62B0A720100312

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

A proposed law that may mean the death of small farms and farmers markets and organic farming? (H.R. 875)

H.R. 875: Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 obviously is playing on the fears raised by recent food safety disasters, and there is a ruckus brewing in some blogs raising alarm over this proposed law. Such as: "Change We Can Believe In: How About the End of Farmers Markets? Say Hello to H.R. 875: Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009" ...What this will do is force anyone who produces food of any kind, and then transports it to a different location for sale, to register with a new federal agency called the “Food Safety Administration.” Even growers who sell just fruit and/or vegetables at farmers markets would not only have to register, but they would be subject inspections by federal agents of their property and all records related to food production.... with the result that providers at farmers markets will be priced out of existence. A commenter on that blog suggested: "I can’t help think this is a prelude (one of many, no doubt) to America’s “harmonizing” (I think that’s the term) with Codex Alimentarius.". If you don't know, Codex Alimentarius is a program some say is being pushed by big industry to control all food and health supplements for some nefarious purpose. While I found that blog post to be overly alarmist I do have concern over big industry pushing down our throats industrialized stuff that serves their needs and isn't necessarily healthy. So let's take a look at this.

The bill defines a proposed "Food Safety Administration" because for example: "the safety of the food supply of the United States is vital to the public health, to public confidence in the food supply, and to the success of the food sector of the Nation’s economy". Yes of course food safety is very important. The purposes include: "(A) regulate food safety and labeling to strengthen the protection of the public health; (B) ensure that food establishments fulfill their responsibility to process, store, hold, and transport food in a manner that protects the public health of all people in the United States; (C) lead an integrated, systemwide approach to food safety and to make more effective and efficient use of resources to prevent food-borne illness; (D) provide a single focal point within the Department of Health and Human Services for food safety leadership, both nationally and internationally; and (E) provide an integrated food safety research capability, including internally generated, scientifically and statistically valid studies, in cooperation with academic institutions and other scientific entities of the Federal and State governments;" Further the act specifies transferring "various components of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration" into this new Food Safety Administration. In other words this is a reshaping of the FDA into a new and larger role.

The definitions include five categories of food establishments which are to be regulated and the various contaminants which will be regulated. Recall that this proposal comes in the wake of a few mass poisonings coming from unsafe food being distributed over the last few years. Contaminated food has been causing death and fear for several years now. Obviously the FDA as it exists has failed in some way to ensure our safety. But I wonder whether the remedies in this bill are the best solution?

SEC. 202. REGISTRATION OF FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS AND FOREIGN FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS: Requires the registration of "Any food establishment or foreign food establishment engaged in manufacturing, processing, packing, or holding food for consumption in the United States shall register annually with the Administrator." Registration seems to be mostly about recording contact addresses and phone numbers. The Administrator can suspend a registered food establishment, there are procedures for reestablishing registration, but it doesn't describe what effect comes from being suspended.

SEC. 203. PREVENTIVE PROCESS CONTROLS TO REDUCE ADULTERATION OF FOOD: Requires the Food Safety Administration to set up regulations that food establishments must meet. This includes sanitation plans, record keeping, labeling, sampling, etc.

SEC. 204. PERFORMANCE STANDARDS FOR CONTAMINANTS IN FOOD: Requires the Food Safety Administration establish standards giving acceptable levels of contaminants. Note that there are existing FDA rules of this sort. It also includes inspections, the ability to seize nonconformant food, and I suppose goes back to the possibility of suspending registration mentioned above.

SEC. 205. INSPECTIONS OF FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS: Requires the Food Safety Administration set up an inspections program.

SEC. 206. FOOD PRODUCTION FACILITIES: Grants the Food Safety Administration authority to "(1) visit and inspect food production facilities in the United States and in foreign countries to determine if they are operating in compliance with the requirements of the food safety law; (2) review food safety records as required to be kept by the Administrator under section 210 and for other food safety purposes; (3) set good practice standards to protect the public and animal health and promote food safety; (4) conduct monitoring and surveillance of animals, plants, products, or the environment, as appropriate; and (5) collect and maintain information relevant to public health and farm practices."

SEC. 207. FEDERAL AND STATE COOPERATION: Calls for greater national and state level cooperation to "strengthen and expand food-borne illness surveillance systems to-- (A) inform and evaluate efforts to prevent food-borne illness; and (B) enhance the identification and investigation of, and response to, food-borne illness outbreaks." To "leverage and enhance the food safety capacity and roles of State and local agencies and integrate State and local agencies as fully as possible into national food safety efforts". In other words this section seems to be about federalizing local authorities, rather than maintaining a separation of national efforts from local efforts.

SEC. 208. IMPORTS: The act is to cover all imported food. A definition at the beginning of the bill defines "Foreign Food Establishment" as a "Food establishment" located outside the U.S. which sends food for sale inside the U.S. Clearly some of the food safety scares of recent years began in foreign countries.

SEC. 210. TRACEBACK REQUIREMENTS: Requires the the Food Safety Administration to "establish a national traceability system that enables the Administrator to retrieve the history, use, and location of an article of food through all stages of its production, processing, and distribution." This defines data formats for computerized records and a system for storing and retrieving records about items of food. Sounds like Big Brother being applied to food. At the same time an issue in the recent food safety scares has been the question over where the food actually came from. Take the spinach scare for example. It focused on the plastic bags of spinach, and it was unclear which field(s) the spinach came from because the food processors buy spinach from several fields, cut the leaves off the stems, mix them all together, then bag the spinach. It's like shuffling several identical decks of cards together, and then trying to put the cards back into their original decks.

SEC. 211. ACCREDITED LABORATORIES: Sets up a registration process and standards for laboratories to partake in the regulation being setup.

There's a lot more to this but the above gives the general tone of this proposed law.

The law sounds reasonable to me on the face of it. Establishment and enforcement of regulations are a good thing. Remember that the Food and Drug Administration was established 100 years ago in the wake of a food safety scare that came in the wake of Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle. That book chronicled the scary conditions in meat packing houses of that era, such as the use of rats in making sausage and generally lax enforcement procedures and rampant bribery.

I wonder if todays food scares has more to do with the last 8 years of Bush Administration gutting all forms of government regulation and oversight. Supposedly the FDA had to let go of many food inspectors. Perhaps the simpler solution is to rehire food inspectors. At the same time there are new threats from globalization of the food supply, and food being imported from foreign lands that have less regulation.

But let's get back to the alarming aspects of this bill. I'll turn to other bloggers and their analysis:

H.R. 875 Food Safety Modernization Act Of 2009 This is an excellent walk-through of the bill from the perspective of an individual gardener who grows food for his own consumption. Would this law apply to individual gardeners?

The problem here is in the definitions section which has overly broad or overly vague definitions that give a wide scope to the Food Safety Administration. A CATEGORY 4 FOOD ESTABLISHMENT is "a food establishment that processes all other categories of food products not described in paragraphs (5) through (7)." Uh, this means that every single last organization which processes and/or provides food is to be regulated by this new administration. "Food" is also overly broadly defined as "intended to be used for food or drink for a human or an animal and components thereof." And, finally, " (14) FOOD PRODUCTION FACILITY- The term ‘food production facility’ means any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation."

This means that the nice sounding regulations and requirements will apply to far more organizations than it applies to today.

Such as farmers markets. Maybe even individual gardeners.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vYJDZNyTg0